Entries tagged "debian edu".

I am happy to report that I on behalf of the Debian Edu team just
sent out
this
announcement:

The Debian Edu Team is pleased to announce the release of Debian Edu
Jessie 8.0+edu0~alpha0
Debian Edu is a complete operating system for schools. Through its
various installation profiles you can install servers, workstations
and laptops which will work together on the school network. With
Debian Edu, the teachers themselves or their technical support can
roll out a complete multi-user multi-machine study environment within
hours or a few days. Debian Edu comes with hundreds of applications
pre-installed, but you can always add more packages from Debian.
For those who want to give Debian Edu Jessie a try, download and
installation instructions are available, including detailed
instructions in the manual[1] explaining the first steps, such as
setting up a network or adding users. Please note that the password
for the user your prompted for during installation must have a length
of at least 5 characters!
[1] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie >
Would you like to give your school's computer a longer life? Are you
tired of sneaker administration, running from computer to computer
reinstalling the operating system? Would you like to administrate all
the computers in your school using only a couple of hours every week?
Check out Debian Edu Jessie!
Skolelinux is used by at least two hundred schools all over the world,
mostly in Germany and Norway.
About Debian Edu and Skolelinux
===============================
Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux[2], is a Linux distribution based
on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages[3] and more are available from the Debian archive, and
schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Xfce and MATE desktop
environment.
[2] <URL: http://www.skolelinux.org/ >
[3] <URL: http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Educational_applications_included_in_Debian_Edu___Skolelinux__the_screenshot_collection____.html >
Full release notes and manual
=============================
Below the download URLs there is a list of some of the new features
and bugfixes of Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie. The full
list is part of the manual. (See the feature list in the manual[4] for
the English version.) For some languages manual translations are
available, see the manual translation overview[5].
[4] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Jessie/Features >
[5] <URL: http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/ >
Where to get it
---------------
To download the multiarch netinstall CD release (624 MiB) you can use
* ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
* http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso
* rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/debian-edu-8.0+edu0~alpha0-CD.iso .
The SHA1SUM of this image is: 361188818e036ce67280a572f757de82ebfeb095
New features for Debian Edu 8.0+edu0~alpha0 Codename Jessie released 2014-10-27
===============================================================================
Installation changes
--------------------
* PXE installation now installs firmware automatically for the hardware present.
Software updates
----------------
Everything which is new in Debian Jessie 8.0, eg:
* Linux kernel 3.16.x
* Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.11.12, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.10,
LXDE 0.5.6 and MATE 1.8 (KDE "Plasma" is installed by default; to
choose one of the others see manual.)
* the browsers Iceweasel 31 ESR and Chromium 38
* !LibreOffice 4.3.3
* GOsa 2.7.4
* LTSP 5.5.4
* CUPS print system 1.7.5
* new boot framework: systemd
* Educational toolbox GCompris 14.07
* Music creator Rosegarden 14.02
* Image editor Gimp 2.8.14
* Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.13.0
* golearn 0.9
* tuxpaint 0.9.22
* New version of debian-installer from Debian Jessie.
* Debian Jessie includes about 42000 packages available for
installation.
* More information about Debian Jessie 8.0 is provided in the release
notes[6] and the installation manual[7].
[6] <URL: http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/releasenotes >
[7] <URL: http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/installmanual >
Fixed bugs
----------
* Inserting incorrect DNS information in Gosa will no longer break
DNS completely, but instead stop DNS updates until the incorrect
information is corrected (Debian bug #710362)
* and many others.
Documentation and translation updates
-------------------------------------
* The Debian Edu Jessie Manual is fully translated to German, French,
Italian, Danish and Dutch. Partly translated versions exist for
Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.
Other changes
-------------
* Due to new Squid settings, powering off or rebooting the main
server takes more time.
* To manage printers localhost:631 has to be used, currently www:631
doesn't work.
Regressions / known problems
----------------------------
* Installing LTSP chroot fails with a bug related to eatmydata about
exim4-config failing to run its postinst (see Debian bug #765694
and Debian bug #762103).
* Munin collection is not properly configured on clients (Debian bug
#764594). The fix is available in a newer version of munin-node.
* PXE setup for Main Server and Thin Client Server setup does not
work when installing on a machine without direct Internet access.
Will be fixed when Debian bug #766960 is fixed in Jessie.
See the status page[8] for the complete list.
[8] <URL: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Jessie >
How to report bugs
------------------
<URL: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs >
About Debian
============
The Debian Project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock to be a truly
free community project. Since then the project has grown to be one of
the largest and most influential open source projects. Thousands of
volunteers from all over the world work together to create and
maintain Debian software. Available in 70 languages, and supporting a
huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal
operating system.
Contact Information
For further information, please visit the Debian web pages[9] or send
mail to press@debian.org.
[9] <URL: http://www.debian.org/ >

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project provide a Linux solution for schools, including a
powerful desktop with education software, a central server providing
web pages, user database, user home directories, central login and PXE
boot of both clients without disk and the installation to install Debian
Edu on machines with disk (and a few other services perhaps to small
to mention here). We in the Debian Edu team are currently working on
the Jessie based version, trying to get everything in shape before the
freeze, to avoid having to maintain our own package repository in the
future. The
current
status can be seen on the Debian wiki, and there is still heaps of
work left. Some fatal problems block testing, breaking the installer,
but it is possible to work around these to get anyway. Here is a
recipe on how to get the installation limping along.

First, download the test ISO via
ftp,
http
or rsync (use
ftp.skolelinux.org::cd-edu-testing-nolocal-netinst/debian-edu-amd64-i386-NETINST-1.iso).
The ISO build was broken on Tuesday, so we do not get a new ISO every
12 hours or so, but thankfully the ISO we already got we are able to
install with some tweaking.

When you get to the Debian Edu profile question, go to tty2
(use Alt-Ctrl-F2), run

nano /usr/bin/edu-eatmydata-install

and add 'exit 0' as the second line, disabling the eatmydata
optimization. Return to the installation, select the profile you want
and continue. Without this change, exim4-config will fail to install
due to a known bug in eatmydata.

When you get the grub question at the end, answer /dev/sda (or if
this do not work, figure out what your correct value would be. All my
test machines need /dev/sda, so I have no advice if it do not fit
your need.

If you installed a profile including a graphical desktop, log in as
root after the initial boot from hard drive, and install the
education-desktop-XXX metapackage. XXX can be kde, gnome, lxde, xfce
or mate. If you want several desktop options, install more than one
metapackage. Once this is done, reboot and you should have a working
graphical login screen. This workaround should no longer be needed
once the education-tasks package version 1.801 enter testing in two
days.

I believe the ISO build will start working on two days when the new
tasksel package enter testing and Steve McIntyre get a chance to
update the debian-cd git repository. The eatmydata, grub and desktop
issues are already fixed in unstable and testing, and should show up
on the ISO as soon as the ISO build start working again. Well the
eatmydata optimization is really just disabled. The proper fix
require an upload by the eatmydata maintainer applying the patch
provided in bug #702711.
The rest have proper fixes in unstable.

I hope this get you going with the installation testing, as we are
quickly running out of time trying to get our Jessie based
installation ready before the distribution freeze in a month.

The Debian installer could be
a lot quicker. When we install more than 2000 packages in
Skolelinux / Debian Edu using
tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever.
A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in
bug #613428 about too
much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package
responsible for unpacking the binary packages. Other parts (like code
executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during
installation. All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to
me. If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try
to salvage the half installed system. So the failure sync-ing is
supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really
relevant while the installer is running.

A few days ago, I thought of a way to get rid of all the file
system sync()-ing in a fairly non-intrusive way, without the need to
change the code in several packages. The idea is not new, but I have
not heard anyone propose the approach using dpkg-divert before. It
depend on the small and clever package
eatmydata, which
uses LD_PRELOAD to replace the system functions for syncing data to
disk with functions doing nothing, thus allowing programs to live
dangerous while speeding up disk I/O significantly. Instead of
modifying the implementation of dpkg, apt and tasksel (which are the
packages responsible for selecting, fetching and installing packages),
it occurred to me that we could just divert the programs away, replace
them with a simple shell wrapper calling
"eatmydata $program $@", to get the same effect.
Two days ago I decided to test the idea, and wrapped up a simple
implementation for the Debian Edu udeb.

The effect was stunning. In my first test it reduced the running
time of the pkgsel step (installing tasks) from 64 to less than 44
minutes (20 minutes shaved off the installation) on an old Dell
Latitude D505 machine. I am not quite sure what the optimised time
would have been, as I messed up the testing a bit, causing the debconf
priority to get low enough for two questions to pop up during
installation. As soon as I saw the questions I moved the installation
along, but do not know how long the question were holding up the
installation. I did some more measurements using Debian Edu Jessie,
and got these results. The time measured is the time stamp in
/var/log/syslog between the "pkgsel: starting tasksel" and the
"pkgsel: finishing up" lines, if you want to do the same measurement
yourself. In Debian Edu, the tasksel dialog do not show up, and the
timing thus do not depend on how quickly the user handle the tasksel
dialog.

Machine/setup

Original tasksel

Optimised tasksel

Reduction

Latitude D505 Main+LTSP LXDE

64 min (07:46-08:50)

<44 min (11:27-12:11)

>20 min 18%

Latitude D505 Roaming LXDE

57 min (08:48-09:45)

34 min (07:43-08:17)

23 min 40%

Latitude D505 Minimal

22 min (10:37-10:59)

11 min (11:16-11:27)

11 min 50%

Thinkpad X200 Minimal

6 min (08:19-08:25)

4 min (08:04-08:08)

2 min 33%

Thinkpad X200 Roaming KDE

19 min (09:21-09:40)

15 min (10:25-10:40)

4 min 21%

The test is done using a netinst ISO on a USB stick, so some of the
time is spent downloading packages. The connection to the Internet
was 100Mbit/s during testing, so downloading should not be a
significant factor in the measurement. Download typically took a few
seconds to a few minutes, depending on the amount of packages being
installed.

The speedup is implemented by using two hooks in
Debian
Installer, the pre-pkgsel.d hook to set up the diverts, and the
finish-install.d hook to remove the divert at the end of the
installation. I picked the pre-pkgsel.d hook instead of the
post-base-installer.d hook because I test using an ISO without the
eatmydata package included, and the post-base-installer.d hook in
Debian Edu can only operate on packages included in the ISO. The
negative effect of this is that I am unable to activate this
optimization for the kernel installation step in d-i. If the code is
moved to the post-base-installer.d hook, the speedup would be larger
for the entire installation.

I've implemented this in the
debian-edu-install
git repository, and plan to provide the optimization as part of the
Debian Edu installation. If you want to test this yourself, you can
create two files in the installer (or in an udeb). One shell script
need do go into /usr/lib/pre-pkgsel.d/, with content like this:

In Debian Edu, I placed both code fragments in a separate script
edu-eatmydata-install and call it from the pre-pkgsel.d and
finish-install.d scripts.

By now you might ask if this change should get into the normal
Debian installer too? I suspect it should, but am not sure the
current debian-installer coordinators find it useful enough. It also
depend on the side effects of the change. I'm not aware of any, but I
guess we will see if the change is safe after some more testing.
Perhaps there is some package in Debian depending on sync() and
fsync() having effect? Perhaps it should go into its own udeb, to
allow those of us wanting to enable it to do so without affecting
everyone.

Update 2014-09-24: Since a few days ago, enabling this optimization
will break installation of all programs using gnutls because of
bug #702711. An updated
eatmydata package in Debian will solve it.

Update 2014-10-17: The bug mentioned above is fixed in testing and
the optimization work again. And I have discovered that the
dpkg-divert trick is not really needed and implemented a slightly
simpler approach as part of the debian-edu-install package. See
tools/edu-eatmydata-install in the source package.

Update 2014-11-11: Unfortunately, a new
bug #765738 in eatmydata only
triggering on i386 made it into testing, and broke this installation
optimization again. If unblock
request 768893 is accepted, it should be working again.

The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
schools, Debian Edu /
Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to
support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
works with Windows . :-(

In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
work with the documentations of our patients.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
his school (Gymnasium
Harsewinkel). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
with this job.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

The independence.

First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.

Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
working reliable.

We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Teachers and pupils are Windows users. <Irony on> And Linux
isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. <Irony
off> They don't realize the stability of the system.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project provide an instruction manual for teachers, system
administrators and other users that contain useful tips for setting up
and maintaining a Debian Edu installation. This text is about how the
text processing of this manual is handled in the project.

One goal of the project is to provide information in the native
language of its users, and for this we need to handle translations.
But we also want to make sure each language contain the same
information, so for this we need a good way to keep the translations
in sync. And we want it to be easy for our users to improve the
documentation, avoiding the need to learn special formats or tools to
contribute, and the obvious way to do this is to make it possible to
edit the documentation using a web browser. We also want it to be
easy for translators to keep the translation up to date, and give them
help in figuring out what need to be translated. Here is the list of
tools and the process we have found trying to reach all these
goals.

We maintain the authoritative source of our manual in the
Debian
wiki, as several wiki pages written in English. It consist of one
front page with references to the different chapters, several pages
for each chapter, and finally one "collection page" gluing all the
chapters together into one large web page (aka
the
AllInOne page). The AllInOne page is the one used for further
processing and translations. Thanks to the fact that the
MoinMoin installation on
wiki.debian.org support exporting pages in
the Docbook format, we can fetch
the list of pages to export using the raw version of the AllInOne
page, loop over each of them to generate a Docbook XML version of the
manual. This process also download images and transform image
references to use the locally downloaded images. The generated
Docbook XML files are slightly broken, so some post-processing is done
using the documentation/scripts/get_manual program, and the
result is a nice Docbook XML file (debian-edu-wheezy-manual.xml) and
a handfull of images. The XML file can now be used to generate PDF, HTML
and epub versions of the English manual. This is the basic step of
our process, making PDF (using dblatex), HTML (using xsltproc) and
epub (using dbtoepub) version from Docbook XML, and the resulting files
are placed in the debian-edu-doc-en binary package.

But English documentation is not enough for us. We want translated
documentation too, and we want to make it easy for translators to
track the English original. For this we use the
poxml package,
which allow us to transform the English Docbook XML file into a
translation file (a .pot file), usable with the normal gettext based
translation tools used by those translating free software. The pot
file is used to create and maintain translation files (several .po
files), which the translations update with the native language
translations of all titles, paragraphs and blocks of text in the
original. The next step is combining the original English Docbook XML
and the translation file (say debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.po), to
create a translated Docbook XML file (in this case
debian-edu-wheezy-manual.nb.xml). This translated (or partly
translated, if the translation is not complete) Docbook XML file can
then be used like the original to create a PDF, HTML and epub version
of the documentation.

The translators use different tools to edit the .po files. We
recommend using
lokalize,
while some use emacs and vi, others can use web based editors like
Poodle or
Transifex. All we care about
is where the .po file end up, in our git repository. Updated
translations can either be committed directly to git, or submitted as
bug reports
against the debian-edu-doc package.

One challenge is images, which both might need to be translated (if
they show translated user applications), and are needed in different
formats when creating PDF and HTML versions (epub is a HTML version in
this regard). For this we transform the original PNG images to the
needed density and format during build, and have a way to provide
translated images by storing translated versions in
images/$LANGUAGECODE/. I am a bit unsure about the details here. The
package maintainers know more.

Debian Edu / Skolelinux
keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
#debian-edu, with a
wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
last development phase of a new social networking concept.

I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
and as a necessary step to gain expertise.

In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
hunger.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I discovered the LTSP advantages
with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
running. I just loved it.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
be made of steel.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I found two main disadvantages.

I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
or dropped.

It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
discourage many people too.

Which free software do you use daily?

I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
Virtualbox.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
the "R" statistical language; a
few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
first scenarios where this will happen.

On larger sites, it is useful to use a dedicated storage server for
storing user home directories and data. The design for handling this
in Debian Edu / Skolelinux, is
to update the automount rules in LDAP and let the automount daemon on
the clients take care of the rest. I was reminded about the need to
document this better when one of the customers of
Skolelinux Drift AS, where I am
on the board of directors, asked about how to do this. The steps to
get this working are the following:

Add new storage server in DNS. I use nas-server.intern as the
example host here.

Add automoun LDAP information about this server in LDAP, to allow
all clients to automatically mount it on reqeust.

Add the relevant entries in tjener.intern:/etc/fstab, because
tjener.intern do not use automount to avoid mounting loops.

DNS entries are added in GOsa², and not described here. Follow the
instructions
in the manual (Machine Management with GOsa² in section Getting
started).

Ensure that the NFS export points on the server are exported to the
relevant subnets or machines:

Here everything on the backbone network is granted access to the
/storage export. With NFSv3 it is slightly better to limit it to
netgroup membership or single IP addresses to have some limits on the
NFS access.

The next step is to update LDAP. This can not be done using GOsa²,
because it lack a module for automount. Instead, use ldapvi and add
the required LDAP objects using an editor.

When the editor show up, add the following LDAP objects at the
bottom of the document. The "/&" part in the last LDAP object is a
wild card matching everything the nas-server exports, removing the
need to list individual mount points in LDAP.

The last step to remember is to mount the relevant mount points in
tjener.intern by adding them to /etc/fstab, creating the mount
directories using mkdir and running "mount -a" to mount them.

When this is done, your users should be able to access the files on
the storage server directly by just visiting the
/tjener/nas-server/storage/ directory using any application on any
workstation, LTSP client or LTSP server.

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
to Dominik
George.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
a bit vacant right now however.

I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
network of that school together with a team of very interested and
talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
to help building another school's informational education concept from
scratch.

That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.

When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
and cycling.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
FrOSCon and visited the project
booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
"out-of-the-box" solution ;).

The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
OpenRheinRuhr 2011 when the
BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
seemed rather uninterested.

After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
that it rocks!

Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
can list a few points about that:

always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream

be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers

be helpful at being helpful ;)

I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!

Which free software do you use daily?

First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
year.

I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
run text tools. I use
mksh as shell,
jupp as very advanced
text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
based full-featured student management software with the two),
mcabber for XMPP and
irssi for IRC. For that overly
coloured world called the WWW, I use
Iceweasel
(Firefox). Oh, and mutt for
e-mail.

However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
kids. One of these things is Jappix,
which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
Facebook now ;).

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
side is what I have experienced.

I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
plain criminal.

That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
founded an association named
Teckids here in Germany that does
just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
area of free and open source software, for example the
FrogLabs, which share staff with
Teckids and are the youth programme of
the Free and Open Source Software
Conference (FrOSCon). We do a lot more than most other conferences
- this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.

Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
Skolelinux in the future ;)!

So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.

It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
but the Debian Edu /
Skolelinux community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
had a new school administrator show up on
#debian-edu to share
his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
Germany a few years ago.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.

All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
projects like the Knoppix GNU/Linux live
system (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
ADRIANE
(a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
LINBO
(Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
system supporting various operating systems).

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Quick installation,

works (almost) out of the box,

contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,

is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
single company,

has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
experience and problem solutions.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
working again reliably.

Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
as their base.

Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".

Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
schemes.

Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
compared to Debian.

For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
upgradeable without reinstallation.

Which free software do you use daily?

GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
programming languages for teaching.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Strong arguments are

Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
teaching and learning.

Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
home, and at their working place without running into license or
conversion problems.

Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
science, not products.

If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
would you need proprietary software for?

The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo
Salvador had published a
video on
Youtube showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu /
Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or
on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network
services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc,
in other word a single user machine). The result is 11 minutes long,
and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked).
Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium
showing the Zygote Body 3D model
of the human body, but I guess he did not know about those or find
other programs more interesting. :) And the video do not show the
advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian
Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of
computers without hard drives by installing one central
LTSP server.

A few hours ago, the announcement for the first stable release of
Debian Edu Wheezy went out from the Debian publicity team. The
complete announcement text can be found at
the Debian News
section, translated to several languages. Please check it out.

There is one minor known problem that we will fix very soon. One
can not install a amd64 Thin Client Server using PXE, as the /var/
partition is too small. A workaround is to extend the partition (use
lvresize + resize2fs in tty 2 while installing).

The third wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
today. This is the release announcement from Holger Levsen:

Hi,

it is my pleasure to announce the third beta release (beta 2 for
short) of Debian Edu /
Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy!

Please test these images extensivly, if no new problems are found
we plan to do this final Debian Edu Wheezy release this coming
weekend. We are not aware of any major problems or blockers in beta2,
if you find something, please notify us immediately!

(More about the remaining steps for the Edu Wheezy release in
another mail to the edu list tonight or tomorrow...)

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Immediately after installation a school
server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD or USB stick all other
machines can be installed via the network. The provided school server
provides LDAP database and Kerberos authentication service,
centralized home directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other
services. The desktop contains more than 60 educational software
packages and more are available from the Debian archive, and schools
can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the seventh test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
Squeeze release.

Notes for upgrades from Alpha Prereleases

Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined on the mailing list. (2)
Accept the new version of gosa.conf and replace both contained admin
password placeholders with the password hashes found in the old one
(backup copy!). In both cases all users need to change their password
to make sure a password is set for CIFS access to their home
directory.

The second wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
today, slightly delayed because of some bugs in the initial Windows
integration fixes . This is the release announcement:

New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b1 released 2013-08-22

These are the release notes for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.1+edu0~b1, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as
Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
the main server from CD or USB stick all other machines can be
installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
desktop contains
more
than 60 educational software packages and more are available from
the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the sixth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically this
is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze
release.

ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
release. Both alpha and beta0 based installations should reinstall or
deal with gosa.conf manually; there are two options: (1) Keep
gosa.conf and edit this file as outlined
on
the mailing list. (2) Accept the new version of gosa.conf and
replace both contained admin password placeholders with the password
hashes found in the old one (backup copy!). In both cases every user
need to change their their password to make sure a password is set for
CIFS access to their home directory.

Software updates

Added ssh askpass packages to default installation, to ensure ssh
work also without a attached tty.

Add the command-not-found package to the default installation to
make it easier to figure out where to find missing command line
tools. Please note, that the command 'update-command-not-found'
has to be run as root to actually make it useful (internet access
required).

Other changes

Adjusted the USB stick ISO image build to include every tool
needed for desktop=xfce installations.

Adjust thin-client-server task to work when installing from USB
stick ISO image.

Made new grub artwork (changed png from indexed to RGB format).

Minor cleanup in the CUPS setup.

Make sure that bootstrapping of the Samba domain really happens
during installation of the main server and adjust SID handling to
cope with this.

The first wheezy based beta release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
today. This is the release announcement:

New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~b0 released
2013-07-27

These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.1+edu0~b0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as
Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
desktop contains
more
than 60 educational software packages and more are available from
the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the fifth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
Squeeze release.

ALERT: Alpha based installations should reinstall or downgrade the
versions of gosa and libpam-mklocaluser to the ones used in this beta
release.

Software updates

Switched roaming workstation profiles from wicd to network-manager
for network configuration, as wicd didn't work any more.

Changed version numbers of patched gosa and libpam-mklocaluser
packages to make sure our locally patched versions will be replaced
by the official packages when they are released from Debian. Those
installing alpha version need to reinstall or manually downgrade gosa
and libpam-mklocaluser.

Added bluetooth tools to the default desktop (bluedevil, blueman).

Added tools for sharing the desktop on KDE (krdc, krfb).

Added valgrind to the default installation for easier debugging of
crash bugs.

Other changes

Fixed artwork package to work with gnome, no longer break
desktop=gnome installations.

Adjusted installer to now work when forced to use a proxy with the
netinst CD.

Fixed code detecting and setting/loading hardware specific
setup/firmware to work more robust out of the box.

Adjusted Kerberos setup to detect realm and server settings at
install time instead of dynamically at run time. This avoid a crash
with krb5-auth-dialog on diskless workstations without a DNS name.

Worked around misfeature in network-manager not calling the dhclient
exit hooks, causing automatic proxy configuration and automatic host
name setting at run time to work again.

Fixed feature setting the default Iceweasel start page from URL
fetched from LDAP, to allow schools to set the global default by
updating the dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no LDAP object.

Changed default host name on all networked machines to be unique
(generated from MAC or reverse DNS) after boot.

Adjusted partition sizes to make sure they are big enough.

Known issues

Grub is missing the new artwork.

KDE fail to understand the wpad.dat file provided, causing it to
not use the http proxy as it should.

It starts 10:00 and continue until late evening. Everyone is
welcome, and there is no fee to participate. There is on the other
hand limited space, and only room for 30 people. Please put your name
on the event
wiki page if you plan to join us.

The fourth wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
today. This is the release announcement:

New features for Debian Edu 7.1+edu0~alpha3 released
2013-07-03

These are the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux
7.1+edu0~alpha3, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as
Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
desktop contains
more
than 60 educational software packages and more are available from
the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the fourth test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
Squeeze release.

Software updates

Dropped ispell dictionaries from our default installation.

Dropped menu-xdg from the KDE desktop option, to drop the Debian
submenu. It was not included with Gnome, LXDE or Xfce, so this
brings KDE in line with the others.

Dropped xdrawchem, xjig and xsok from our default installation as
they don't have a desktop menu entry and thus won't show up in the
menu now that menu-xdg was removed.

Removed the killer system to kill left behind processes on
multi-user machines, as it was no longer able to understand when a
X display was in use and killed the processes of the active users
too.

Dropped the golearn (from goplay) package as the debtags in wheezy
are too few to make the package useful.

Other changes

Updated artwork matching http://wiki.debian.org/DebianArt/Themes/Joy

Multi-arch i386/amd64 USB stick ISO available.

Got rid of ispell/wordlist related debconf questions that showed
up for some language options.

Switched to using http.debian.net as APT source by default.

Fixed proxy configuration on Main Server installations.

Changed LTSP setup to ask dpkg to use force-unsafe-io the same way
d-i is doing it.

Made sure root and user passwords were not left behind in the
debconf database after installation on Main Server installations.

Made Roaming Workstation dynamic setup more robust and added draft
script setup-ad-client to hook a Roaming Workstation up to a
Active Directory server instead of a Debian Edu Main Server.

Update system to install needed firmware packages during
installation, to work properly in Wheezy.

In the Debian Edu /
Skolelinux project, we include a post-installation test suite,
which check that services are running, working, and return the
expected results. It runs automatically just after the first boot on
test installations (using test ISOs), but not on production
installations (using non-test ISOs). It test that the LDAP service is
operating, Kerberos is responding, DNS is replying, file systems are
online resizable, etc, etc. And it check that the PXE service is
configured, which is the topic of this post.

The last week I've fixed the DVD and USB stick ISOs for our Debian
Edu Wheezy release. These ISOs are supposed to be able to install a
complete system without any Internet connection, but for that to
happen all the needed packages need to be on them. Thanks to our test
suite, I discovered that we had forgotten to adjust our PXE setup to
cope with the new names and paths used by the netboot d-i packages.
When Internet connectivity was available, the installer fall back to
using wget to fetch d-i boot images, but when offline it require
working packages to get it working. And the packages changed name
from debian-installer-6.0-netboot-$arch to
debian-installer-7.0-netboot-$arch, we no longer pulled in the
packages during installation. Without our test suite, I suspect we
would never have discovered this before release. Now it is fixed
right after we got the ISOs operational.

Another by-product of the test suite is that we can ask system
administrators with problems getting Debian Edu to work, to run the
test suite using /usr/sbin/debian-edu-test-install and see if
any errors are detected. This usually pinpoint the subsystem causing
the problem.

The Debian Edu and
Skolelinux distribution have users and contributors all around the
globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
our IRC channel
#debian-edu and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
with him, to learn more about him.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
party, I had a very nice beer discussion with a
friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
field.

A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
of Fundația Ceata, which is a free
software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
the only one we have in our country.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
ways to contribute.

My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
have a pretty consistent starting point.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
it comes to managing a school's network, for example.

Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
project.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!

Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
on.

Which free software do you use daily?

I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
Enlightenment project a lot!),
Claws Mail due to its ease of
use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
Redshift, which helps me
get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
that:

schools would like to get rid of proprietary software

students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
of teenagers more?

there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
them!)

more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)

I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
very hard to convert against their will.

There is a certain cross-over between the
Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project and the Edubuntu
project, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is
Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)

I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
each other.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
[Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
we'll get there one day.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
very high quality work.

I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
community members and commercial suppliers to support.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
what I originally rambled on about)

The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
currently.

I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
autonomous.

Which free software do you use daily?

My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)

Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
X.

I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
it :p)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
that.

I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
advantage of that.

I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
best solution for them.

To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
make a decision that would work for them.

The third wheezy based alpha release of Debian Edu was wrapped up
today. This is the release announcement:

New features for Debian Edu 7.0.0 alpha2 released
2013-06-10

This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
alpha2, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as
Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
network. Immediately after installation a school server running all
services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
installed via the network. The provided school server provides LDAP
database and Kerberos authentication service, centralized home
directories, DHCP server, web proxy and many other services. The
desktop contains
more
than 60 educational software packages and more are available from
the Debian archive, and schools can choose between KDE, Gnome, LXDE
and Xfce desktop environment.

This is the third test release based on Debian Wheezy. Basically
this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the
Squeeze release.

Here is a call for help from the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project.
We have two problems blocking the release of the Wheezy version we
hope to get released soon. The two problems require some with PHP
skills, and we seem to lack anyone with both time and PHP skills in
the project:

It is impossible to log into the slbackup web interface
(slbackup-php) using the root user and password. This is
BTS report #700257.
This used to work, but stopped working some time since Squeeze.
Perhaps some obsolete PHP feature was used?

It is not possible to "mass import" user lists in Gosa, neither
using ldif nor using CSV files. The feature was disabled after a
major rewrite of Gosa, and need to be ported to the new system.
This is BTS report
#698840.

It has been a while since my last English
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
in the project, Cédric Boutillier.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.

I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
packaging, publicity and translation.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
the
Debian Edu manual for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
manual.

I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.

What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
by GOsa². What pleased
me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
artistic skills with music (Ardour,
Audacity) and
movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
Stopmotion).

I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
#debian-edu.
Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
beautiful project.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
fact that it provides a solution ready to use.

I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
of educational free software.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.

One can find support from a company by looking at
the
wiki dokumentation, where some countries already have a number of
companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
support for Debian Edu as well.

Which free software do you use daily?

I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
also using the mathematical software
Scilab and
Sage (built from
source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).

Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
statistics?

I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
university, we use both R and
Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
geometry, there are nice programs:

Included in Debian Edu /
Skolelinux, there are quite a lot of educational software.
Created to help teachers teach, and pupils learn. We have tried to
tag them all using debtags use::learning and role::program, and using
the debtags I was happy to be able to create a collage of the
educational software packages installed by default, sorted by the
debtag field. Here it is. Click on a image to learn more about the
program.

Debian Edu / Skolelinux is
an operating system based on Debian intended for use in schools. It
contain a turn-key solution for the computer network provided to
pupils in the primary schools. It provide both the central server,
network boot servers and desktop environments with heaps of
educational software. The project was founded almost 12 years ago,
2001-07-02. If you want to support the project, which is in need for
cash to fund developer gatherings and other project related activity,
please
donate some money.

A topic that come up again and again on the Debian Edu mailing
lists and elsewhere, is the question on how to transform a Debian or
Ubuntu installation into a Debian Edu installation. It isn't very
hard, and last week I wrote a script to replicate the steps done by
the Debian Edu installer.

The script,
debian-edu-bless
in the debian-edu-config package, will go through these six steps and
transform an existing Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu (untested) installation
into a Debian Edu Workstation:

Preseed debconf database with profile setup in
/etc/debian-edu/config, and run tasksel to install packages
according to the profile specified in the config above,
overriding some of the Debian automation machinery.

Run debian-edu-cfengine-D installation to configure everything
that could not be done using preseeding.

Ask for a reboot to enable all the configuration changes.

There are some steps in the Debian Edu installation that can not be
replicated like this. Disk partitioning and LVM setup, for example.
So this script just assume there is enough disk space to install all
the needed packages.

The script was created to help a Debian Edu student working on
setting up Raspberry Pi as a
Debian Edu client, and using it he can take the existing
Raspbian installation and
transform it into a fully functioning Debian Edu Workstation (or
Roaming Workstation, or whatever :).

The default setting in the script is to create a KDE Workstation.
If a LXDE based Roaming workstation is wanted instead, modify the
PROFILE and DESKTOP values at the top to look like this instead:

PROFILE="Roaming-Workstation"
DESKTOP="lxde"

The script could even become useful to set up Debian Edu servers in
the cloud, by starting with a virtual Debian installation at some
virtual hosting service and setting up all the services on first
boot.

This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux 7.0.0 edu
alpha1, based on Debian with
codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based
on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely
configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school
server running all services needed for a school network is set up just
waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable
Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after
initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all
other machines can be installed via the network.

This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
version compared to the Squeeze release.

When I woke up this morning, I was very happy to see that the
release announcement
for Debian Wheezy was waiting in my mail box. This is a great
Debian release, and I expect to move my machines at home over to it fairly
soon.

The new debian release contain heaps of new stuff, and one program
in particular make me very happy to see included. The
Scratch program, made famous by
the Teach kids code movement, is
included for the first time. Alongside similar programs like
kturtle and
turtleart,
it allow for visual programming where syntax errors can not happen,
and a friendly programming environment for learning to control the
computer. Scratch will also be included in the next release of Debian
Edu.

And now that Wheezy is wrapped up, we can wrap up the next Debian
Edu/Skolelinux release too. The
first
alpha release went out last week, and the next should soon
follow.

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made
its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release
announcement:

New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released
2013-04-26

This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0
edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy".

About Debian Edu and Skolelinux

Debian Edu, also known as
Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an
out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school
network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all
services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users
and machines being added via GOsa², a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting
environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of
the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be
installed via the network.

This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is
not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved
version compared to the Squeeze release.

This years first Skolelinux /
Debian Edu developer gathering take place the coming weekend in Trondheim.
Details about the gathering can be found
on
the FRiSK wiki. The dates are 19-21th of April 2013, and online
participation for those unable to make it in person is very welcome,
and I plan to participate online myself as I could not leave Oslo this
weekend.

The focus of the gathering is to work on the web pages and project
infrastructure, and to continue the work on the Wheezy based Debian
Edu release.

Via
twitter
I just discovered that Pcwizz have
done a video
review on Youtube of Skolelinux
/ Debian Edu version 6. He installed the standalone profile and
the video show a walk-through of of the menu content, demonstration of
a few programs and his view of our distribution.

There is also some really nice quotes (transcribed by me, might
have heard wrong). While looking thought the Graphics menu:

"Basically everything you ever need in a school environment."

And as a general evaluation of the entire distribution:

"So, yeah, a bit bloated. It kept all the Debian stuff in there, just
to keep it nice and GNU. So, I do not want to go on about it, but
lets give it 7 out of 10. I am not going to use it. That is because
I am not deploying a school network. There may be some mythical
feature to help you deploy Skolelinux on a school network."

To bad he did not test the server profile, and discovered the PXE
installation option. It make it possible to install only the main
server from CD, and the rest of the machines via the net, and might be
considered the mythical feature he talk about. :)

While looking through the menus, there is also this funny comment
about the part of the K menu generated from the Debian menu subsystem:

"[The K menu] have a special Debian section for software that no-one
is going to look at, because it contain lots of junky stuff that you
actually don't need in the education distribution, but have just been
included because it isn't stripped out for some reason."

I guess it is yet another argument for merging the Debian menu and
Gnome/KDE desktop menu entries into
one
consistent menu system instead of two incomplete and partly
inconsistent menu systems.

The entire video is available below for those accepting iframe
embedding:

Debian Edu 6.0.7+r1 is an incremental update to Debian Edu
6.0.4+r0, containing all the changes between Debian 6.0.4 and 6.0.7 as
well Debian Edu specific bugfixes and enhancements. See below (in this
mail) for the full list of (edu) changes. Please see
http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311
for more information on "Debian Edu Squeeze".

I was happy to discover a few days ago that the
Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project also this year received a Christmas present from Another
Agency in Trondheim. NOK 1000,- showed up on our donation account
December 24th. I want to express our thanks for this very welcome
present. As the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is very short on
funding these days, and thus lack the money to do regular developer
gatherings, this donation was most welcome. One developer gathering
cost around NOK 15 000,-, so we need quite a lot more to keep the
development pace we want. Thus, I hope their example this year is
followed by many others. :)

The public list of donors can be found on
the
donation page for the project, which also contain instructions if
you want to donate to the project.

A few days ago I came across
a blog post from Joey
Hess describing ledger and
hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
are at least five
different implementations able to read the format. An example
entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:

2004-05-27 Book Store
Expenses:Books $20.00
Liabilities:Visa

The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
look for others using it. I found blog posts from
Christine
Spang,
Pete
Keen,
Andrew
Cantino and
Ronald
Ip describing how they use it, as well as a post from
Bradley
M. Kuhn at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
recommendations fitting my need.

The ledger
package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
hledger
package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
seemed the best choice to get started.

To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
web scraper for
LODO, the accounting system used by
the NUUG association, and started to
play with the data set. I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
using the "ledger balance" command. But I will have to
gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
for the organisations I am involved in.

Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux
community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
the people behind the German
"IT-Zukunft Schule"
project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
welcome to Angela Fuß. :)

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.

At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.

In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
relationship management and the communication processes in the
project.

Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
and a yoga teacher.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I fell in love with Mike ;-).

Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
several points where the communication with the schools head or the
teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
parents.

Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
Germany.

First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
answer comes rather from a social point of view.

The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
teachers, parents...

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
Skolelinux / Debian Edu.

What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.

Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.

Which free software do you use daily?

On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
my N900 running with Maemo.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
strategy has three crucial pillars:

We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.

Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.

Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
offer to become more and more independent from us.

After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
training is anyway very important

I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
SPSE school (secondary) is a very
special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
already several years ago. But since the system was still not
Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
hole.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
hassle.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
devices that have specific software packages for another specific
distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)

Which free software do you use daily?

I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
Perceus
has the same...

For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
just because they are normally not open to change.

Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
don't.

We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.

The Debian Edu /
Skolelinux project have users all over the globe, but until
recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
to adjust and scale the just released
Debian Edu
Wheezy setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
happy to share his answers with you here.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
"folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
perspective when working with IT.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
seriously into Skolelinux instead.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
quicker to update.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.

I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
are done. This is important if you want to get a job.

Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.

We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
sound file.

So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.

Which free software do you use daily?

Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.

Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
article Radio station
management with Airtime,
Airtime which
claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
Rivendell which claim to
be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
useful to the aspiring radio producer.

In the Debian Edu / Skolelinux project, we have realised that one
of the major blockers for the project success is the purchasing skills
in schools and municipalities. We provide what the happy users of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux say they need and to a lower cost than the
alternatives, and yet so few schools decide to use our solution. I
was pleased to discover the same observation done by mySociety and Tom
Steinberg in his blog post
"Can
you recognize the million pound chair?". Read it and weep for the
spending of your tax money.

Of course there are other factors involved as well, like our
projects bad marketing skills and the Linux community fragmentation
causing worry with the people on the outside, so we as a project need
to keep working hard to gain users, but it is a up-hill battle when
public decision makers are unable to understand computer system
purchases.

Included in Debian Edu /
Skolelinux is a large collection of end user and school specific
software. It is one of the packages not installed by default but
provided in the Debian archive for schools to install if they want to,
is a system to automatically plan the school time table using
information about available teachers, classes and rooms, combined with
the list of required courses and how many hours each topic should
receive. The software is
named FET, and it provide a
graphical user interface to input the required information, save the
result in a fairly simple XML format, and generate time tables for
both teachers and students. It is available both for
Linux, MacOSX and
Windows.

Platform independent implementation, allowing running on
GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac and any system that Qt supports

Flexible modular XML format for the input file, allowing editing
with an XML editor or by hand (besides FET interface)

Import/export from CSV format

The resulted timetables are exported into HTML, XML and CSV
formats

Flexible students structure, organized into sets: years, groups
and subgroups. FET allows overlapping years and groups and
non-overlapping subgroups. You can even define individual students
(as separate sets)

Each constraint has a weight percentage, from 0.0% to 100.0%
(but some special constraints are allowed to have only 100% weight
percentage)

Limits for the algorithm (all these limits can be increased on
demand, as a custom version, because this would require a bit more
memory):

Maximum total number of hours (periods) per day: 60

Maximum number of working days per week: 35

Maximum total number of teachers: 6000

Maximum total number of sets of students: 30000

Maximum total number of subjects: 6000

Virtually unlimited number of activity tags

Maximum number of activities: 30000

Maximum number of rooms: 6000

Maximum number of buildings: 6000

Possibility of adding multiple teachers and
students sets for each activity. (it is possible
also to have no teachers or no students sets for an
activity)

Virtually unlimited number of time constraints

Virtually unlimited number of space constraints

A large and flexible palette of time constraints:

Break periods

For teacher(s):

Not available periods

Max/min days per week

Max gaps per day/week

Max hours daily/continuously

Min hours daily

Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag

Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
days per week

For students (sets):

Not available periods

Begins early (specify max allowed beginnings at second hour)

Max gaps per day/week

Max hours daily/continuously

Min hours daily

Max hours daily/continuously with an activity tag

Respect working in an hourly interval a max number of
days per week

For an activity or a set of activities/subactivities:

A single preferred starting time

A set of preferred starting times

A set of preferred time slots

Min/max days between them

End(s) students day

Same starting time/day/hour

Occupy max time slots from selection (a complex and
flexible constraint, useful in many situations)

Consecutive, ordered, grouped (for 2 or 3 (sub)activities)

Not overlapping

Max simultaneous in selected time slots

Min gaps between a set of (sub)activities

A large and flexible palette of space constraints:

Room not available periods

For teacher(s):

Home room(s)

Max building changes per day/week

Min gaps between building changes

For students (sets):

Home room(s)

Max building changes per day/week

Min gaps between building changes

Preferred room(s):

For a subject

For an activity tag

For a subject and an activity tag

Individually for a (sub)activity

For a set of activities:

Occupy a maximum number of different rooms

I have not used it myself, as I am not involved in time table
planning at a school, but it seem to work fine when I test it. If you
need to set up your schools time table, and is tired of doing it
manually, check it out.
A quick summary on how to use it can be found in
a
blog post from MarvelSoft. If you find FET useful, please provide
a recipe for the Debian Edu project in the
Debian Edu HowTo
section.

I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
another interview with the people behind
Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
Debian Edu
Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
ICT in schools

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
been used everyday inside Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
technologies in school.

Which free software do you use daily?

Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
between Iceweasel, Geany and
Terminator.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.

Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
universities. So different strategies are needed.

But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
working there.

During my work on
Debian Edu
based on Squeeze, I came across some issues that should be
addressed in the Wheezy release. I finally found time to wrap up my
notes and provide quick summary of what I found, with a bit
explanation.

We need to rewrite our package installation framework, as tasksel
changed from using tasksel tasks to using meta packages (aka packages
with dependencies like our education-* packages), and our installation
system depend on tasksel tasks in
/usr/share/tasksel/debian-edu-tasks.desc for package
installation.

Enable Kerberos login for more services. Now with the Kerberos
foundation in place, we should use it to get single sign on with more
services, and avoiding unneeded password / login questions. We should
at least try to enable it for these services:

CUPS for admins to add/configure printers and users when using
quotas.

Nagios for admins checking the system status.

GOsa for admins updating LDAP and users changing their passwords.

LDAP for admins updating LDAP.

Squid for users when exam mode / filtering is active.

ssh for admins and users to save a password prompt.

When we move GOsa to use Kerberos instead of LDAP bind to
authenticate users, we should try to block or at least limit access to
use LDAP bind for authentication, to ensure Kerberos is used when it
is intended, and nothing fall back to using the less safe LDAP bind

Merge debian-edu-config and debian-edu-install. The split made
sense when d-e-install did a lot more, but these days it is just an
inconvenience when we update the debconf preseeding values.

Fix partman-auto to allow us to abort the installation before
touching the disk if the disk is too small. This is
BTS report #653305 and the
d-i developers are fine with the patch and someone just need to apply
it and upload. After this is done we need to adjust
debian-edu-install to use this new hook.

Adjust to new LTSP framework (boot time config instead of install
time config). LTSP changed its design, and our hooks to install
packages and update the configuration is most likely not going to work
in Wheezy.

Consider switching to NBD instead of NFS for LTSP root, to allow
the Kernel to cache files in its normal file cache, possibly speeding
up KDE login on slow networks.

Make it possible to create expired user passwords that need to
change on first login. This is useful when handing out password on
paper, to make sure only the user know the password. This require
fixes to the PAM handling of kdm and gdm.

Make GUI for adding new machines automatically from sitesummary.
The current command line script is not very friendly to people most
familiar with GUIs. This should probably be integrated into GOsa to
have it available where the admin will be looking for it..

We should find way for Nagios to check that the DHCP service
actually is working (as in handling out IP addresses). None of the
Nagios checks I have found so far have been working for me.

We should switch from libpam-nss-ldapd to sssd for all profiles
using LDAP, and not only on for roaming workstations, to have less
packages to configure and consistent setup across all profiles.

We should configure Kerberos to update LDAP and Samba password
when changing password using the Kerberos protocol. The hook was
requested in BTS report
#588968 and is now available in Wheezy. We might need to write a
MIT Kerberos plugin in C to get this.

We should clean up the set of applications installed by default.

reduce the number of chemistry visualisers

consider dropping xpaint

and probably more?

Some hardware need external firmware to work properly. This is
mostly the case for WiFi network cards, but there are some other
examples too. For popular laptops to work out of the box, such
firmware need to be installed from non-free, and we should provide
some GUI to do this. Ubuntu already have this implemented, and we
could consider using their packages. At the moment we have some
command line script to do this (one for the running system, another
for the LTSP chroot).

In Squeeze, we provide KDE, Gnome and LXDE as desktop options. We
should extend the list to Xfce and Sugar, and preferably find a way to
install several and allow the admin or the user to select which one to
use.

The golearn tool from the goplay package make it easy to check out
interesting educational packages. We should work on the package
tagging in Debian to ensure it represent all the useful educational
packages, and extend the tool to allow it to use packagekit to install
new applications with a simple mouse click.

The Squeeze version got half a exam solution already in place,
with the introduction of iptable based network blocking, but for it to
be a complete exam solution the Squid proxy need to enable
filtering/blocking as well when the exam mode is enabled. We should
implement a way to easily enable this for the schools that want it,
instead of the "it is documented" method of today.

A feature used in several schools is the ability for a teacher to
"take over" the desktop of individual or all computers in the room.
There are at least three implementations,
italc,
controlaula og
epoptes and we should pick one of
them and make it trivial to set it up in a school. The challenges is
how to distribute crypto keys and how to group computers in one room
and how to set up which machine/user can control the machines in a
given room.

Tablets and surf boards are getting more and more popular, and we
should look into providing a good solution for integrating these into
the Debian Edu network. Not quite sure how. Perhaps we should
provide a installation profile with better touch screen support for
them, or add some sync services to allow them to exchange
configuration and data with the central server. This should be
investigated.

I guess we will discover more as we continue to work on the Wheezy
version.

Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
Debian Edu
Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
(Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
by Angela).

During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
becoming an osteopath.

Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
"IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
skills with communication skills.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
"IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
distributions that target being used for school networks.

At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.

In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
protection experts, other IT professionals.

We came to two conclusions:

First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
point.

Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
tries to provide an approach for this.

Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
spare time.

We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
non-existent until 2010/2011.

Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
avoidance do exist.

We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
and probably a gain for all.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
project communication, honest communication within the group of
developers, etc.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Every coin has two sides:

Technically: BTS issue
#311188, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
contribute).

Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
there being rather disconnected from the development department of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux.

Which free software do you use daily?

For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.

For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.

I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.

For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
whiteboard.

My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
since then, helping to make sure the
Debian Edu
Squeeze release became as good as it is..

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
O- or A-level ("Abitur"). For quite as long, I've been taking care of
our computer network.

Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
(4 months).

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
(Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
(Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
administration costs tend towards zero.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
i.e. harder to understand for novices.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
difference between proprietary software products, and free software
developing.

Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
share among German Skolelinux schools.

Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.

Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
shared world wide (school books e.g.).

Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.

Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.

Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
keep sending documents in ODF formats.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
publish another interview with the people behind
Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
details get right before release.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as
certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a
certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.

My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
home since 2006.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
computers in use. I answered: "Yes".

Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
Bielefeld in December of 2006.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
for me as today.

In the past there were advantages like:

I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
they had little money to spent for computers and software.

It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
cost.

It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
server

I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
came up in this way:

Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
now.

They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.

With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
interfaces used in the past.

It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
different needs.

The documentation is usable and gets better every day.

More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
is sharing knowledge and minds.

Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
whole municipality areas.

Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
politicians.

Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily?

I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.

My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
and the whole family. I probably forgot something.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
countries and areas all over the world.

Behind Debian Edu and
Skolelinux there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
up in the recently released
Debian
Edu Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
information technology and science/technology.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
contributing.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
Debian Project!

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
rather small and often busy elsewhere.

The Debian LAN
project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.

Which free software do you use daily?

I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader". The school
administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.

To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
the system. There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
"Free/Open Standards". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.

I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
"localisation".

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I
had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
education system.

I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
money on the latest hardware.

Which free software do you use daily?

I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
you would hardly need a strategy.

Recently I have spent time with
Skolelinux Drift AS on speeding
up a Debian Edu / Skolelinux
Lenny installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the
process I discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE
menu was responding slow when using it for the first time, was mostly
due to the way KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing
the Multimedia menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be
passed between the LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were
NFS LOOKUP calls, resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Because the
ping times between the client and the server were in the range 2-20
ms, the menus would be very slow. Looking at the strace of kicker in
Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I see that
the source of these NFS calls are access(2) system calls for
non-existing files. KDE can do hundreds of access(2) calls to find
one icon file. In my example, just finding the mplayer icon required
around 230 access(2) calls.

The KDE code seem to search for icons using a list of icon
directories, and the list of possible directories is large. In
(almost) each directory, it look for files ending in .png, .svgz, .svg
and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
mounted. Showing a single sub menu may result in thousands of NFS
requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
KDE bug report
from 2009 about this problem, and it is still unsolved.

My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
kde-icon-cache that upon installation will look at all .desktop files
used to generate the KDE menu, find their icons, search the icon paths
for the file that KDE will end up finding at run time, and copying the
icon file to /var/lib/kde-icon-cache/. Finally, I add symlinks to
these icon files in one of the first directories where KDE will look
for them. This cut down the number of file accesses required to find
one icon from several hundred to less than 5, and make the KDE menu
almost instantaneous. I'm not quite sure where to make the package
publicly available, so for now it is only available on request.

The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
that is not really an option at the moment.

If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
(at) lists.debian.org.

Germany is a core area for the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
"Westfalen-Kolleg
Dortmund", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.

Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
the end of April this year.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
Skolelinux.

Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
the admin teachers.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
So it was a perfect choice.

Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
possible to point teachers and students to programs like
OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It's of
high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
a school and to choose where to get support for this.

The same Debian Edu developer that did the last screen cast I
published, Wolfgang Schweer, has created a new screen cast showing how
to set up Kmail in Debian Edu Squeze to authenticate using Kerberos,
allowing users to check their local email account without providing
any password. The video is embedded here in quarter size,
and also available from vimeo
and download as a
Ogg
Theora file. Check it out below.

I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
installations.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
these things we decided to try it.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
proprietary software everywhere.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!

Which free software do you use daily?

Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
that counts...)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
applications". However, schools today are experiencing budget
constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.

I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu users in this country has to be part of it.

Documentation in Debian Edu is provided in several languages, and
it is important to make it both easy to contribute and to keep the
translated versions in sync. To do this we have come up with what we
believe is a very efficient work flow.

This docbook document is given to po4a to extract a gettext style
.pot file with the content, which in turn is used to create .po files
with the translated text.

The .po files are given to translators, and they can always tell
which part of the original wiki document is new or changed. They can
use their normal translation tools like lokalize or poedit to write
the translation. There is even a system in place to handle translated
images.

The translated .po files are combined with the original docbook
XML document using po4a to create a translated docbook document.

The final step is to use all the generated docbook files and
create PDF and HTML version of the original and translated documents.

This setup work very well, but have a few issues. The biggest
issue is that the docbook support
we use in moinmoin is not actively maintained. The docbook
support is also buggy, and our build system contain workarounds to
make sure the generated docbook is usable despite these bugs.

This weekend we finally published the first stable release of
Skolelinux / Debian Edu based
on Debian/Squeeze. The full announcement is
available
from the project announcement list. Now is a good time to test if it
you have not done so already.

I plan to present the new version at
a NUUG
meeting on tuesday. I look forward to seeing you there if you are
in Oslo, Norway.

Inspired by the
interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
more international audience.

While Debian Edu and
Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away
from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions,
and am happy to share the response with you. :)

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
Japan.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
help.

Which free software do you use daily?

Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
(customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
house, that's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
doesn't play flash, for example.

One of the Debian Edu developers, Wolfgang Schweer, just created a
screen cast documenting how to create a lot of new users in LDAP on
Debian Edu Squeeze. The video is embedded here in quarter size, and
also available from vimeo and
download as a
Ogg
Theora file. Check it out below.

This weekend we wrapped up and published the third release
candidate for Debian Edu /
Skolelinux based on Squeeze. The full announcement is
available
from the project announcement list. Check it out if you
need a software solution for your school.

Many years ago, the Skolelinux
/ Debian Edu project initiated a student project to create a tool
for making stop motion movies. The proposal came from a teacher
needing such tool on Skolelinux. The project, called "stopmotion",
was manned by two extraordinary students and won a school award and a
national aware with this great project. The project was initiated and
mentored by Herman Robak, and manned by the students Bjørn Erik Nilsen
and Fredrik Berg Kjølstad. They got in touch with people at Aardman
Animation studio and received feedback on how professionals would like
such stopmotion tool to work, and the end result was and is used by
animators around the globe. But as is usual after studying, both got
jobs and went elsewhere, and did not have time to properly tend to the
project, and it has been lingering for a few years now. Until last
year...

Last year some of the users got together with Herman, and moved the
project to Sourceforge and in effect restarted the project under a new
name,
linuxstopmotion.
The name change was done to make it possible to find the project using
Internet search engines (try to search for 'stopmotion' to see what I
mean). I've been following
the
mailing list and the improvement already in place and planned for
the future is encouraging. If you want to make stop motion movies.
Check it out. :)

This weekend we wrapped up and published the second release
candidate for Debian Edu /
Skolelinux based on Squeeze. The full announcement did for some
reason not make it the project announcement list, but is
available
from the Debian development announcement list. Check it out if you
need a software solution for your school.

One week delayed due to DVD build problems, we managed today to
wrap up and publish the first release candidate for
Debian Edu / Skolelinux based
on Squeeze. The full announcement is
available
on the project announcement list. Check it out if you need a software
solution for your school.

New in the Squeeze version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux is the
ability for clients to automatically configure their proxy settings
based on their environment. We want all systems on the client to use
the WPAD based proxy definition fetched from http://wpad/wpad.dat, to
allow sites to control the proxy setting from a central place and make
sure clients do not have hard coded proxy settings. The schools can
change the global proxy setting by editing
tjener:/etc/debian-edu/www/wpad.dat and the change propagate
to all Debian Edu clients in the network.

The problem is that some systems do not understand the WPAD system.
In other words, how do one get from a WPAD file like this (this is a
simple one, they can run arbitrary code):

To do this conversion I developed a perl script that will execute
the javascript fragment in the WPAD file and return the proxy that
would be used for
http://www.debian.org/,
and insert this extracted proxy URL in /etc/environment and
/etc/apt/apt.conf. The perl script wpad-extract work just
fine in Squeeze, but in Wheezy the library it need to run the
javascript code is no longer
able to build because the C library it depended on is now a C++
library. I hope someone find a solution to that problem before Wheezy
is frozen. An alternative would be for us to rewrite wpad-extract to
use some other javascript library currently working in Wheezy, but no
known alternative is known at the moment.

This automatic proxy system allow the roaming workstation (aka
laptop) setup in Debian Edu/Squeeze to use the proxy when the laptop
is connected to the backbone network in a Debian Edu setup, and to
automatically use any proxy present and announced using the WPAD
feature when it is connected to other networks. And if no proxy is
announced, direct connections will be used instead.

Silently using a proxy announced on the network might be a privacy
or security problem. But those controlling DHCP and DNS on a network
could just as easily set up a transparent proxy, and force all HTTP
and FTP connections to use a proxy anyway, so I consider that
distinction to be academic. If you are afraid of using the wrong
proxy, you should avoid connecting to the network in question in the
first place. In Debian Edu, the proxy setup is updated using dhcp and
ifupdown hooks, to make sure the configuration is updated every time
the network setup changes.

Since the Lenny version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux, a
feature to save power have been included. It is as simple as it is
practical: Shut down unused clients at night, and turn them on again
in the morning. This is done using the
shutdown-at-night Debian package.

To enable this feature on a client, the machine need to be added to
the netgroup shutdown-at-night-hosts. For Debian Edu, this is done in
LDAP, and once this is in place, the machine in question will check
every hour from 16:00 until 06:00 to see if the machine is unused, and
shut it down if it is. If the hardware in question is supported by
the
nvram-wakeup
package, the BIOS is told to turn the machine back on around 07:00 +-
10 minutes. If this isn't working, one can configure wake-on-lan to
try to turn on the client. The wake-on-lan option is only documented
and not enabled by default in Debian Edu.

It is important to not turn all machines on at once, as this can
blow a fuse if several computers are connected to the same fuse like
the common setup for a classroom. The nvram-wakeup method only work
for machines with a functioning hardware/BIOS clock. I've seen old
machines where the BIOS battery were dead and the hardware clock were
starting from 0 (or was it 1990?) every boot. If you have one of
those, you have to turn on the computer manually.

The shutdown-at-night package is completely self contained, and can
also be used outside the Debian Edu environment. For those without a
central LDAP server with netgroups, one can instead touch the file
/etc/shutdown-at-night/shutdown-at-night to enable it.
Perhaps you too can use it to save some power?

I am happy to announce that finally we managed today to wrap up and
publish the third beta version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux based
on Squeeze. If you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with
out of the box PXE configuration for running diskless machines and
installing new machines, check it out. If you need a software
solution for your school, check it out too. The full announcement is
available
on the project announcement list.

I am very happy to report these changes and improvements since
beta2 (there are more, see announcement for full list):

It is now possible to change the pre-configured IP subnet from
10.0.0.0/8 to something else by using the subnet-change tool after
the installation.

Too full partitions are now automatically extended on the Main
Server, based on the rules specified in /etc/fsautoresizetab.

The CUPS queues are now automatically flushed every night, and all
disabled queues are restarted every hour. This should cut down on
the amount of manual administration needed for printers.

The set of initial users have been changed. Now a personal user
for the local system administrator is created during installation
instead of the previously created localadmin and super-admin users,
and this user is granted administrative privileges using group
membership. This reduces the number of passwords one need to keep
up to date on the system.

The new main server seem to work so well that I am testing it as my
private DNS/LDAP/Kerberos/PXE/LTSP server at home. I will use it look
for issues we could fix to polish Debian Edu even further before the
final Squeeze release is published.

Next weekend the project organise a
developer
gathering in Oslo. We will continue the work on the Squeeze
version, and start initial planning for the Wheezy version. Perhaps I
will see you there?

With some computer hardware, one need non-free firmware blobs.
This is the sad fact of todays computers. In the next version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux based
on Squeeze, we provide several scripts and modifications to make
firmware blobs easier to handle. The common use case I run into is a
laptop with a wireless network card requiring non-free firmware to
work, but there are other use cases as well.

First and foremost, Debian Edu provide ISO images for DVD and CD
with all firmware packages in the Debian sections main and non-free
included, to ensure debian-installer find and can install all of them
during installation. This take care firmware for network devices used
by the installer when installing from from local media. But for
example multimedia devices are not activated in the installer and are
not taken care of by this.

For non-network devices, we provide the script
/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/auto-addfirmware which
search through the dmesg output for drivers requesting extra
firmware. The firmware file name is looked up in the Contents-ARCH.gz
file available in the package repository, and the packages providing
the requested firmware file(s) is installed. I have proposed to do
something similar in debian-installer (BTS report
#655507), to allow PXE
installs of Debian to handle firmware installation better. Run the
script as root from the command line to fetch and install the needed
firmware packages.

Debian Edu provide PXE installation of Debian out of the box, and
because some machines need firmware to get their network cards
working, the installation initrd some times need extra firmware
included to be able to install at all. To fill the PXE installation
initrd with extra firmware, the
/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/pxe-addfirmware script is
provided. Again, just run it as root on the command line to fill the
PXE initrd with firmware packages.

Last, some LTSP clients might also need firmware to get their
network cards working. For this,
/usr/share/debian-edu-config/tools/ltsp-addfirmware is
provided to update the LTSP initrd with firmware blobs. It is used
the same way as the other firmware related tools.

At the moment, we do not run any of these during installation. We
do not know if this is acceptable for the local administrator to use
non-free software, and it is their choice.

We plan to release beta3 this weekend. You might want to give it a
try.

The next version of Debian Edu
/ Skolelinux will include a new tool
sitesummary2ldapdhcp, which can be used to quickly set up all
the computers in a school without much manual labour. Here is a short
summary on how to use it to set up a new school.

First, install a combined Main Server and Thin Client Server as the
central server in the network. Next, PXE boot all the client machines
as thin clients and wait 5 minutes after the last client booted to
allow the clients to report their existence to the central server. When
this is done, log on to the central server and run
sitesummary2ldapdhcp -a in the konsole to use the
collected information to generate system objects in LDAP. The output
will look similar to this:

After providing the LDAP administrative password (the same as the
root password set during installation), the LDAP database will be
populated with system objects for each PXE booted machine with
automatically generated names. The final step to set up the school is
then to log into GOsa,
the web based user, group and system administration system to change
system names, add systems to the correct host groups and finally
enable DHCP and DNS for the systems. All clients that should be used
as diskless workstations should be added to the workstation-hosts
group. After this is done, all computers can be booted again via PXE
and get their assigned names and group based configuration
automatically.

We plan to release beta3 with the updated version of this feature
enabled this weekend. You might want to give it a try.

Update 2012-01-28: When calling sitesummary2ldapdhcp to add new
hosts, one need to add the option -a. I forgot to mention this in my
original text, and have added it to the text now.

In the Squeeze version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux soon
to be released, users of the system will get their default browser
start page set from LDAP, allowing the system administrator to point
all users to the school web page by updating one setting in LDAP. In
addition to setting the default start page when a machine boots, users
are shown the same page as a welcome page when they log in for the
first time.

The LDAP object dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no have an attribute
labeledURI with "http://www/ LDAP for Debian Edu/Skolelinux" as the
default content. By changing this value to another URL, all users get
to see the page behind this new URL.

An easy way to update it is by using the ldapvi tool. It can be
called as "ldapvi -ZD '(cn=admin)'' to update LDAP with the
new setting.

We have written the code to adjust the default start page and show
the welcome page, and I wonder if there is an easier way to do this
from within Iceweasel instead.

I am happy to announce that today we managed to wrap up and publish
the second beta version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux. If
you want to test a LDAP backed Kerberos server with out of the box PXE
configuration for running diskless machines and installing new
machines, check it out. If you need a software solution for your
school, check it out too. The full announcement is
available
on the project announcement list.

During christmas, I have been working getting the next version of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux ready
for release. The initial problem I looked at was particularly
interesting.

The installer would hang at the end when it was doing it
post-installation configuration, and whatevery I did to try to find
the cause and fix it always worked while I tested it, but never when I
integrated it into the installer and ran the installation from
scratch. I would try to restart processes, close file descriptors,
remove or create files, and the installer would always unblock and
wrap up its tasks.

Eventually the cause was found. The kernel was simply running out
of entropy, causing the Kerberos setup to hang waiting for more.
Pressing keys was adding entropy to the kernel, and thus all my tries
to fix the problem worked not because what I was typing to fix it, but
because I was typing.

The fix I implemented was to add a background process looking at
the level of entropy in the kernel (by checking
/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail), and if it was too small, the
installer will flush the kernel file buffers and do 'find /' to
generate some disk IO. Disk IO generate entropy in the kernel, and is
one of the few things that can be initated from within the system to
generate entropy.

The last few days I have spent at work here at the University of Oslo testing if the new
batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few
years the university have organised shared bid of a few thousand
computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and
five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX
group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL
and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the
university.

My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and
perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE
install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run
a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When
something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move
on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS
vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely
have the time to do this for all the problems I find.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests
I perform on a new model.

Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid
and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with
RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.

Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after
installation, X.org is working.

Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in
package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second
reported by the program.

Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when
logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there
are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if
the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I
normally test this by playing
a HTML5
video in Firefox/Iceweasel.

Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB
memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.

Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD
I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.

Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a
picture from the v4l device show up.

Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if
any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a
few.

For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have
memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE
notice this.

For laptops, is suspend/hibernate working? I'm testing if the
special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after
resume.

For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level,
adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output,
switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from
laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are
not.

Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers,
acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how
to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their
existence.

By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are
for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report
the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work
fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid,
and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you
can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting
observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the frame rate than
RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.

On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux
development
gathering in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I
really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the
Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in
learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.

On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of
organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen,
will hold its
General Assembly
for 2010. Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388
people registered as members. Last year 32 members cast their vote in
the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to
vote this year.

In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were
presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC.
Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try
to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out
gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure
model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message
reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or
just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.

But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use
mplayer in Debian
Edu/Skolelinux. The reason is simple. We need a good browser
plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is
not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there
is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I
last
tested the browser plugins available in Debian, the VLC plugin
failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If
the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer
package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.

While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly
annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of
keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its
shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window.
For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I
wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in
window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart
the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the
web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at
what is going on.

Michael Biebl suggested to me on IRC, that I changed my automated
upgrade testing of the
Lenny
Gnome and KDE Desktop to do apt-get autoremove when using apt-get.
This seem like a very good idea, so I adjusted by test scripts and
can now present the updated result from today:

Running apt-get autoremove made the results using apt-get and
aptitude a bit more similar, but there are still quite a lott of
differences. I have no idea what packages should be installed after
the upgrade, but hope those that do can have a look.

Most of the computers in use by the
Debian Edu/Skolelinux project
are virtual machines. And they have been Xen machines running on a
fairly old IBM eserver xseries 345 machine, and we wanted to migrate
them to KVM on a newer Dell PowerEdge 2950 host machine. This was a
bit harder that it could have been, because we set up the Xen virtual
machines to get the virtual partitions from LVM, which as far as I
know is not supported by KVM. So to migrate, we had to convert
several LVM logical volumes to partitions on a virtual disk file.

I found
a
nice recipe to do this, and wrote the following script to do the
migration. It uses qemu-img from the qemu package to make the disk
image, parted to partition it, losetup and kpartx to present the disk
image partions as devices, and dd to copy the data. I NFS mounted the
new servers storage area on the old server to do the migration.

The script is perhaps so simple that it is not copyrightable, but
if it is, it is licenced using GPL v2 or later at your discretion.

After doing this, I booted a Debian CD in rescue mode in KVM with
the new disk image attached, installed grub-pc and linux-image-686 and
set up grub to boot from the disk image. After this, the KVM machines
seem to work just fine.

Answering
the
call from the Gnash project for
buildbot slaves to test the
current source, I have set up a virtual KVM machine on the Debian
Edu/Skolelinux virtualization host to test the git source on
Debian/Squeeze. I hope this can help the developers in getting new
releases out more often.

As the developers want less main-stream build platforms tested to,
I have considered setting up a Debian/kfreebsd
machine as well. I have also considered using the kfreebsd
architecture in Debian as a file server in NUUG to get access to the 5
TB zfs volume we currently use to store DV video. Because of this, I
finally got around to do a test installation of Debian/Squeeze with
kfreebsd. Installation went fairly smooth, thought I noticed some
visual glitches in the cdebconf dialogs (black cursor left on the
screen at random locations). Have not gotten very far with the
testing. Noticed cfdisk did not work, but fdisk did so it was not a
fatal problem. Have to spend some more time on it to see if it is
useful as a file server for NUUG. Will try to find time to set up a
gnash buildbot slave on the Debian Edu/Skolelinux this weekend.

Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu /
Skolelinux DVD, which is
supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications
needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even
schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu
working using this DVD.

The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started
installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of
packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and
that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created
a patch for debian-cd in BTS
report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to
the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space.

A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from
the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that
those needing these applications are few and can get them from the
Debian archive.

Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages
were using most space. A few large packages are well know;
openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also
discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB.
The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and
when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were
the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package.
I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of
our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond
documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package
which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the
free X driver should work.

With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome
desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the
DVD more useful again.

My gnash pledge to
raise money for the project is going well. The lower limit of 10
signers was reached in 24 hours, and so far 13 people have signed it.
More signers and more funding is most welcome, and I am really curious
how far we can get before the time limit of December 24 is reached.
:)

On the #gnash IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I was just tipped
about what appear to be a great code coverage tool capable of
generating code coverage stats without any changes to the source code.
It is called
kcov,
and can be used using kcov <directory> <binary>.
It is missing in Debian, but the git source built just fine in Squeeze
after I installed libelf-dev, libdwarf-dev, pkg-config and
libglib2.0-dev. Failed to build in Lenny, but suspect that is
solvable. I hope kcov make it into Debian soon.

Finally found time to wrap up the release notes for a
new alpha release of Debian Edu, and just published the second
alpha test release of the Squeeze based Debian Edu /
Skolelinux
release. Give it a try if you need a complete linux solution for your
school, including central infrastructure server, workstations, thin
client servers and diskless workstations. A nice touch added
yesterday is RDP support on the thin client servers, for windows
clients to get a Linux desktop on request.

In the Debian
popularity-contest numbers, the adobe-flashplugin package the
second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth
most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that
working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the
users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package
installed.

I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was
said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand
everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a
comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and
non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common
understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for
example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because
it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux
distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web
pages they want to visit.

This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian
and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the
distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google
Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance
to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as
the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in
unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7.
The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the
release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree
with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus
accept the new package into Squeeze.

Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
previous
post about sshfs. He reported another problem with sshfs. It
fail to handle hard links properly. A simple way to spot this is to
look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree. These should have
a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1. I just tested to see
what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:

I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
avoid surprised unix programs. Not as useful as working file locking
and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
nevertheless. :)

My file system sematics program
presented
a few days ago is very useful to verify that a file system can
work as a unix home directory,and today I had to extend it a bit. I'm
looking into alternatives for home directory access here at the
University of Oslo, and one of the options is sshfs. My friend
Finn-Arne mentioned a while back that they had used sshfs with Debian
Edu, but stopped because of problems. I asked today what the problems
where, and he mentioned that sshfs failed to handle umask properly.
Trying to detect the problem I wrote this addition to my fs testing
script:

As reported earlier, the last few days I have looked at how Debian
Edu clients are configured, and tried to get rid of all hardcoded
configuration settings on the clients. I believe the work to be
mostly done, and the clients seem to work just fine with dynamically
generated configuration.

What is the point, you might ask? The point is to allow a Debian
Edu desktop to integrate into an existing network infrastructure
without any manual configuration.

This is what happens when installing a Debian Edu client here at
the University of Oslo using PXE. With the PXE installation, I am
asked for language (Norwegian Bokmål), locality (Norway) and keyboard
layout (no-latin1), Debian Edu profile (Roaming Workstation), if I
accept to reformat the hard drive (yes), if I want to submit info to
popcon.debian.org (no) and root password (secret). After answering
these questions, the installer goes ahead and does its thing, and
after around 50 minutes it is done. I press enter to finish the
installation, and the machine reboots into KDE. When the machine is
ready and kdm asks for login information, I enter my university
username and password, am told by kdm that a local home directory has
been created and that I must log in again, and finally log in with the
same username and password to the KDE 4.4 desktop. At no point during
this process did it ask for university specific settings, and all the
required configuration was dynamically detected using information
fetched via DHCP and DNS. The roaming workstation is now ready for
use.

How was this done, you might wonder? First of all, here is the
list of things that need to be configured on the client to get it
working properly out of the box:

IP address/netmask and DNS server.

Web proxy URL.

LDAP server for NSS directory information (user, group, etc).

Kerberos server for PAM password checking.

SMB mount point to access the network home directory. (*)

Central syslog server to send syslog messages to. (*)

Sitesummary collector URL to submit info to central server. (*)

(Hm, did I forget anything? Let me knew if I did.)

The points marked (*) are not required to be able to use the
machine, but needed to provide central storage and allowing system
administrators to track their machines. Since yesterday, everything
but the sitesummary collector URL is dynamically discovered at boot
and installation time in the svn version of Debian Edu.

The IP and DNS setup is fetched during boot using DHCP as usual.
When a DHCP update arrives, the proxy setup is updated by looking for
http://wpat/wpad.dat and using the content of this WPAD file to
configure the http and ftp proxy in /etc/environment and
/etc/apt/apt.conf. I decided to update the proxy setup using a DHCP
hook to ensure that the client stops using the Debian Edu proxy when
it is moved outside the Debian Edu network, and instead uses any local
proxy present on the new network when it moves around.

The DNS names of the LDAP, Kerberos and syslog server and related
configuration are generated using DNS information at boot. First the
installer looks for a host named ldap in the current DNS domain. If
not found, it looks for _ldap._tcp SRV records in DNS instead. If an
LDAP server is found, its root DSE entry is requested and the
attributes namingContexts and defaultNamingContext are used to
determine which LDAP base to use for NSS. If there are several
namingContexts attibutes and the defaultNamingContext is present, that
LDAP subtree is used as the base. If defaultNamingContext is missing,
the subtrees listed as namingContexts are searched in sequence for any
object with class posixAccount or posixGroup, and the first one with
such an object is used as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
search is done by first looking for a host named kerberos, and then
for the _kerberos._tcp SRV record. I've been unable to find a way to
look up the Kerberos realm, so for this the upper case string of the
current DNS domain is used.

For the syslog server, the hosts syslog and loghost are searched
for, and the _syslog._udp SRV record is consulted if no such host is
found. This algorithm works for both Debian Edu and the University of
Oslo. A similar strategy would work for locating the sitesummary
server, but have not been implemented yet. I decided to fetch and
save these settings during installation, to make sure moving to a
different network does not change the set of users being allowed to
log in nor the passwords required to log in. Usernames and passwords
will be cached by sssd when the user logs in on the Debian Edu
network, and will not change as the laptop move around. For a
non-roaming machine, there is no caching, but given that it is
supposed to stay in place it should not matter much. Perhaps we
should switch those to use sssd too?

The user's SMB mount point for the network home directory is
located when the user logs in for the first time. The LDAP server is
consulted to look for the user's LDAP object and the sambaHomePath
attribute is used if found. If it isn't found, the home directory
path fetched from NSS is used instead. Assuming the path is of the
form /site/server/directory/username, the second part is looked up in
DNS and used to generate a SMB URL of the form
smb://server.domain/username. This algorithm works for both Debian
edu and the University of Oslo. Perhaps there are better attributes
to use or a better algorithm that works for more sites, but this will
do for now. :)

This work should make it easier to integrate the Debian Edu clients
into any LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure, and make the current setup even
more flexible than before. I suspect it will also work for thin
client servers, allowing one to easily set up LTSP and hook it into a
existing network infrastructure, but I have not had time to test this
yet.

If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Update 2010-08-09: Simon Farnsworth gave me a heads-up on how to
detect Kerberos realm from DNS, by looking for _kerberos TXT entries
before falling back to the upper case DNS domain name. Will have to
implement it for Debian Edu. :)

A few years ago, I was involved in a project planning to use
Windows file servers as home directory servers for Debian
Edu/Skolelinux machines. This was thought to be no problem, as the
access would be through the SMB network file system protocol, and we
knew other sites used SMB with unix and samba as the file server to
mount home directories without any problems. But, after months of
struggling, we had to conclude that our goal was impossible.

The reason is simply that while SMB can be used for home
directories when the file server is Samba running on Unix, this only
work because of Samba have some extensions and the fact that the
underlying file system is a unix file system. When using a Windows
file server, the underlying file system do not have POSIX semantics,
and several programs will fail if the users home directory where they
want to store their configuration lack POSIX semantics.

As part of this work, I wrote a small C program I want to share
with you all, to replicate a few of the problematic applications (like
OpenOffice.org and GCompris) and see if the file system was working as
it should. If you find yourself in spooky file system land, it might
help you find your way out again. This is the fs-test.c source:

I do not remember the exact details of the problems we saw, but one
of them was with locking, where if I remember correctly, POSIX allow a
read-only lock to be upgraded to a read-write lock without unlocking
the read-only lock (while Windows do not). Another was a bug in the
CIFS/SMB client implementation in the Linux kernel where directory
meta information would be wrong for a fraction of a second, making
OpenOffice.org fail to create its deep directory tree because it was
not allowed to create files in its freshly created directory.

Anyway, here is a nice tool for your tool box, might you never need
it. :)

Update 2010-08-27: Michael Gebetsroither report that he found the
script so useful that he created a GIT repository and stored it in
http://github.com/gebi/fs-test.

A few days ago, I
tried
to install a Roaming workation profile from Debian Edu/Squeeze
while on the university network here at the University of Oslo, and
noticed how much had to change to get it operational using the
university infrastructure. It was fairly easy, but it occured to me
that Debian Edu would improve a lot if I could get the client to
connect without any changes at all, and thus let the client configure
itself during installation and first boot to use the infrastructure
around it. Now I am a huge step further along that road.

With our current squeeze-test packages, I can select the roaming
workstation profile and get a working laptop connecting to the
university LDAP server for user and group and our active directory
servers for Kerberos authentication. All this without any
configuration at all during installation. My users home directory got
a bookmark in the KDE menu to mount it via SMB, with the correct URL.
In short, openldap and sssd is correctly configured. In addition to
this, the client look for http://wpad/wpad.dat to configure a web
proxy, and when it fail to find it no proxy settings are stored in
/etc/environment and /etc/apt/apt.conf. Iceweasel and KDE is
configured to look for the same wpad configuration and also do not use
a proxy when at the university network. If the machine is moved to a
network with such wpad setup, it would automatically use it when DHCP
gave it a IP address.

The LDAP server is located using DNS, by first looking for the DNS
entry ldap.$domain. If this do not exist, it look for the
_ldap._tcp.$domain SRV records and use the first one as the LDAP
server. Next, it connects to the LDAP server and search all
namingContexts entries for posixAccount or posixGroup objects, and
pick the first one as the LDAP base. For Kerberos, a similar
algorithm is used to locate the LDAP server, and the realm is the
uppercase version of $domain.

So, what is not working, you might ask. SMB mounting my home
directory do not work. No idea why, but suspected the incorrect
Kerberos settings in /etc/krb5.conf and /etc/samba/smb.conf might be
the cause. These are not properly configured during installation, and
had to be hand-edited to get the correct Kerberos realm and server,
but SMB mounting still do not work. :(

With this automatic configuration in place, I expect a Debian Edu
roaming profile installation would be able to automatically detect and
connect to any site using LDAP and Kerberos for NSS directory and PAM
authentication. It should also work out of the box in a Active
Directory environment providing posixAccount and posixGroup objects
with UID and GID values.

If you want to help out with implementing these things for Debian
Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

The new roaming workstation profile in Debian Edu/Squeeze is fairly
similar to the laptop setup am I working on using Ubuntu for the
University of Oslo, and just for the heck of it, I tested today how
hard it would be to integrate that profile into the university
infrastructure. In this case, it is the university LDAP server,
Active Directory Kerberos server and SMB mounting from the Netapp file
servers.

I was pleasantly surprised that the only three files needed to be
changed (/etc/sssd/sssd.conf, /etc/ldap.conf and
/etc/mklocaluser.d/20-debian-edu-config) and one file had to be added
(/usr/share/perl5/Debian/Edu_Local.pm), to get the client working.
Most of the changes were to get the client to use the university LDAP
for NSS and Kerberos server for PAM, but one was to change a hard
coded DNS domain name in the mklocaluser hook from .intern to
.uio.no.

This testing was so encouraging, that I went ahead and adjusted the
Debian Edu scripts and setup in subversion to centralise the roaming
workstation setup a bit more and avoid the hardcoded DNS domain name,
so that when I test this tomorrow, I expect to get away with modifying
only /etc/sssd/sssd.conf and /etc/ldap.conf to get it to use the
university servers.

My goal is to get the clients to have no hardcoded settings and
fetch all their initial setup during installation and first boot, to
allow them to be inserted also into environments where the default
setup in Debian Edu has been changed or as with the university, where
the environment is different but provides the protocols Debian Edu
uses.

I just posted this announcement culminating several months of work
with the next Debian Edu release. Not nearly done, but one major step
completed.

This is the first test release based on Squeeze. The focus of this
release is to test the user application selection. To have a look,
install the standalone profile and let the developers know if the set
of installed packages i.e. applications should be modified. If some
user application is missing, or if there are some applications that no
longer make sense to be included in Debian Edu, please let us know.
Also, if a useful application is missing the translation for your
language of choice, please let us know too.

In addition, feedback and help to polish the desktop (menus,
artwork, starters, etc.) is appreciated. We would like to ship a nice
and handy KDE4 desktop targeted for schools out of the box.

The other profiles should be installable, but there is a lot more
work left to be done before they are ready, so do not expect to
much.

Changes compared to the lenny based version

Everything from Debian Squeeze

Desktop environment KDE 4.4 => the new KDE desktop in
combination with some new artwork

Web browser Iceweasel 3.5

OpenOffice.org 3.2

Educational toolbox GCompris 9.3

Music creator Rosegarden 10.04.2

Image editor Gimp 2.6.10

Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.0

Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.10.4

3D modeler Blender 2.49.2 (new application)

Video editor Kdenlive 0.7.7 (new application)

Now using Kerberos for password checking (migration not finished).
Enabled for:

PAM

LDAP

IMAP

SMTP (sender verification)

New experimental roaming workstation profile for laptops.

Show welcome page to users when they first log in. The URL is
fetched from LDAP.

New LXDE desktop option, in addition to KDE (default) and Gnome.

General cleanup (not finished)

The following features are not working as they should

No web based administration tool for creating users and groups. The
scripts ldap-createuser-krb and ldap-add-user-to-group can be used
for testing.

DVD installs are missing debian-installer images for the PXE boot,
and do not set up the PXE menu on eth0 because of this. LTSP
clients should still boot from eth1 on thin client servers.

The restructured KDE menu is not implemented.

The LDAP server setup need to be reviewed for security.

The LDAP directory structure need to be reworked.

Different sets of packages are installed when using the DVD and the
netinst CD. More packages are installed using the netinst CD.

The jackd package fail to install. This is believed to be caused by
some ongoing transition, and hopefully should be solved soon. The
jackd1 package can be installed manually for those that need it.

Some packages lack translations. See
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Status/Squeeze for updated status,
and help out with translations.

The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers have
been working hard to get the Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian
Edu/Skolelinux into shape. This future version will use Kerberos for
authentication, and services are slowly migrated to single signon,
getting rid of password questions one at the time.

It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home
directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux
network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE
to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This
shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if
SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils
package. I was pleasantly surprised how well it worked.

Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it
to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user
password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut
in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped
up. :)

One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in
Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now
also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.

We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks
to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to
sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for
the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if
it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in
time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc
still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha
release another day.

If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP
LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap
and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two
implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP.

To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and
dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed
on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary.

powerdns

Clues
on how to set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on
the web.

PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend.
One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done
using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and
reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure
based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and
2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa.

In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its
base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding
"dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for
"(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and
"dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for
"(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For
forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord,
nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord,
txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord,
srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord,
ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord,
spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for
the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord,
ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord,
locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent
ldapsearch commands could look like this:

In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with
ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two
example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the
parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
also exist.

In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for
forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the
same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter
"(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl,
arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord,
mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord,
naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a
subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)"
and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and
modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord
go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used
instead.

The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch
like this:

In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a
search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and
reverse lookups.

A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not
specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it
need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any
objectclass that provide the needed attributes.

The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and
dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like
ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord.

In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes
dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS
attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use
of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these
classes with the object classes used by DHCP.

There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the
dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS
attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in
this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well
(zonename and relativedomainname).

My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict
mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain,
dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information
with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class
defined something like this (using the attributes defined for
dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):

This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with
the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include
all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS
developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are
interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my
message will be accepted into their mailing list soon.

ISC dhcp

The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all
the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This
make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but
thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea
what is needed without having to read the source code.

In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the
search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is
stored. These are the relevant entries from
/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:

The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP
configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP
base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The
search result is this entry:

The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the
subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base
is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP
Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter
"(&(objectClass=dhcpService)(|(dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))".
The search result is this entry:

Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When
all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests.
The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes
top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions,
top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options
and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the
details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my
investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp
related computer objects.

When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address
of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree
scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as
the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet
00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look
like:

There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here.
The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration
need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the
positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without
the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make
it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the
configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the
DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost
structural object class.

Conclusion

The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come
to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it
come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible,
allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified
in the configuration.

The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both
regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use.
I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the
objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not
really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed
structure.

Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like
this might work for Debian Edu:

This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost
entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored
there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base
would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree.

The combined object under the machines subtree would look something
like this:

For a while now, I have wanted to find a way to change the DNS and
DHCP services in Debian Edu to use the same LDAP objects for a given
computer, to avoid the possibility of having a inconsistent state for
a computer in LDAP (as in DHCP but no DNS entry or the other way
around) and make it easier to add computers to LDAP.

I've looked at how powerdns and dhcpd is using LDAP, and using this
information finally found a solution that seem to work.

The old setup required three LDAP objects for a given computer.
One forward DNS entry, one reverse DNS entry and one DHCP entry. If
we switch powerdns to use its strict LDAP method (ldap-method=strict
in pdns-debian-edu.conf), the forward and reverse DNS entries are
merged into one while making it impossible to transfer the reverse map
to a slave DNS server.

If we also replace the object class used to get the DNS related
attributes to one allowing these attributes to be combined with the
dhcphost object class, we can merge the DNS and DHCP entries into one.
I've written such object class in the dnsdomainaux.schema file (need
proper OIDs, but that is a minor issue), and tested the setup. It
seem to work.

With this test setup in place, we can get away with one LDAP object
for both DNS and DHCP, and even the LTSP configuration I suggested in
an earlier email. The combined LDAP object will look something like
this:

The DNS server uses the associateddomain and arecord entries, while
the DHCP server uses the dhcphwaddress and dhcpstatements entries
before asking DNS to resolve the fixed-adddress. LTSP will use
dhcphwaddress or associateddomain and the ldapconfig* attributes.

I am not yet sure if I can get the DHCP server to look for its
dhcphost in a different location, to allow us to put the objects
outside the "DHCP Config" subtree, but hope to figure out a way to do
that. If I can't figure out a way to do that, we can still get rid of
the hosts subtree and move all its content into the DHCP Config tree
(which probably should be renamed to be more related to the new
content. I suspect cn=dnsdhcp,ou=services or something like that
might be a good place to put it.

If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Vagrant mentioned on IRC today that ltsp_config now support
sourcing files from /usr/share/ltsp/ltsp_config.d/ on the thin
clients, and that this can be used to fetch configuration from LDAP if
Debian Edu choose to store configuration there.

Armed with this information, I got inspired and wrote a test module
to get configuration from LDAP. The idea is to look up the MAC
address of the client in LDAP, and look for attributes on the form
ltspconfigsetting=value, and use this to export SETTING=value to the
LTSP clients.

The goal is to be able to store the LTSP configuration attributes
in a "computer" LDAP object used by both DNS and DHCP, and thus
allowing us to store all information about a computer in one place.

This is a untested draft implementation, and I welcome feedback on
this approach. A real LDAP schema for the ltspClientAux objectclass
need to be written. Comments, suggestions, etc?

I'm not sure this shell construction will work, because I suspect
the while block might end up in a subshell causing the variables set
there to not show up in ltsp-config, but if that is the case I am sure
the code can be restructured to make sure the variables are passed on.
I expect that can be solved with some testing. :)

If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Update 2010-07-17: I am aware of another effort to store LTSP
configuration in LDAP that was created around year 2000 by
PC
Xperience, Inc., 2000. I found its
files on a
personal home page over at redhat.com.

Since
my
last post about available LDAP tools in Debian, I was told about a
LDAP GUI that is even better than luma. The java application
jXplorer is claimed to be capable of
moving LDAP objects and subtrees using drag-and-drop, and can
authenticate using Kerberos. I have only tested the Kerberos
authentication, but do not have a LDAP setup allowing me to rewrite
LDAP with my test user yet. It is
available in
Debian testing and unstable at the moment. The only problem I
have with it is how it handle errors. If something go wrong, its
non-intuitive behaviour require me to go through some query work list
and remove the failing query. Nothing big, but very annoying.

Here is a short update on my my
Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the
difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm
not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when
aptitude try because of missing conflicts
(#584861 and
#585716).

At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a
complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these
differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really
know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to
publish the difference.

I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was
changed
in git today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely.
No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce
the difference somewhat.

For a laptop, centralized user directories and password checking is
a bit troubling. Laptops are typically used also when not connected
to the network, and it is vital for a user to be able to log in or
unlock the screen saver also when a central server is unavailable.
This is possible by caching passwords and directory information (user
and group attributes) locally, and the packages to do so are available
in Debian. Here follow two recipes to set this up in Debian/Squeeze.
It is also possible to set up in Debian/Lenny, but require more manual
setup there because pam-auth-update is missing in Lenny.

This is the traditional method with a twist. The password caching is
provided by libpam-ccreds (version 10-4 or later is needed on
Squeeze), and the directory caching is done by nscd. The directory
lookup and password checking is done using LDAP. If one want to use
Kerberos for password checking the libpam-ldapd package can be
replaced with libpam-krb5 or libpam-heimdal. If one is happy having a
local home directory with the path listed in LDAP, one can use the
pam_mkhomedir module from pam-modules to make this happen instead of
using libpam-mklocaluser. A setup for pam-auth-update to enable
pam_mkhomedir will have to be written until a fix for
bug #568577 is in the
archive. Because I believe it is a bad idea to have local home
directories using misleading paths like /site/server/partition/, I
prefer to create a local user with the home directory in /home/. This
is done using the libpam-mklocaluser package.

These packages need to be installed and configured

libnss-ldapd libpam-ldapd nscd libpam-ccreds libpam-mklocaluser

The ldapd packages will ask for LDAP connection information, and
one have to fill in the values that fits ones own site. Make sure the
PAM part uses encrypted connections, to make sure the password is not
sent in clear text to the LDAP server. I've been unable to get TLS
certificate checking for a self signed certificate working, which make
LDAP authentication unsafe for Debian Edu (nslcd is not checking if it
is talking to the correct LDAP server), and very much welcome feedback
on how to get this working.

Because nscd do not have a default configuration fit for offline
caching until bug #485282
is fixed, this configuration should be used instead of the one
currently in /etc/nscd.conf. The changes are in the fields
reload-count and positive-time-to-live, and is based on the
instructions I found in the
LDAP for Mobile Laptops
instructions by Flyn Computing.

While we wait for a mechanism to update /etc/nsswitch.conf
automatically like the one provided in
bug #496915, the file
content need to be manually replaced to ensure LDAP is used as the
directory service on the machine. /etc/nsswitch.conf should normally
look like this:

The important parts are that ldap is listed last for passwd, group,
shadow and netgroup.

With these changes in place, any user in LDAP will be able to log
in locally on the machine using for example kdm, get a local home
directory created and have the password as well as user and group
attributes cached.

Because nscd have had its share of problems, and seem to have
problems doing proper caching, I've seen suggestions and recipes to
use nss-updatedb to copy parts of the LDAP database locally when the
LDAP database is available. I have not tested such setup, because I
discovered sssd.

LDAP/Kerberos + sssd + libpam-mklocaluser

A more flexible and robust setup than the nscd combination
mentioned earlier that has shown up recently, is the
sssd package from Redhat.
It is part of the FreeIPA project
to provide a Active Directory like directory service for Linux
machines. The sssd system combines the caching of passwords and user
information into one package, and remove the need for nscd and
libpam-ccreds. It support LDAP and Kerberos, but not NIS. Version
1.2 do not support netgroups, but it is said that it will support this
in version 1.5 expected to show up later in 2010. Because the
sssd package
was missing in Debian, I ended up co-maintaining it with Werner, and
version 1.2 is now in testing.

These packages need to be installed and configured to get the
roaming setup I want

libpam-sss libnss-sss libpam-mklocaluser

The complete setup of sssd is done by editing/creating
/etc/sssd/sssd.conf.

The last few days I have been looking into the status of the LDAP
directory in Debian Edu, and in the process I started to miss a GUI
tool to browse the LDAP tree. The only one I was able to find in
Debian/Squeeze and Lenny is
LUMA, which has proved to
be a great tool to get a overview of the current LDAP directory
populated by default in Skolelinux. Thanks to it, I have been able to
find empty and obsolete subtrees, misplaced objects and duplicate
objects. It will be installed by default in Debian/Squeeze. If you
are working with LDAP, give it a go. :)

I did notice one problem with it I have not had time to report to
the BTS yet. There is no .desktop file in the package, so the tool do
not show up in the Gnome and KDE menus, but only deep down in in the
Debian submenu in KDE. I hope that can be fixed before Squeeze is
released.

I have not yet been able to get it to modify the tree yet. I would
like to move objects and remove subtrees directly in the GUI, but have
not found a way to do that with LUMA yet. So in the mean time, I use
ldapvi for that.

If you have tips on other GUI tools for LDAP that might be useful
in Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Update 2010-06-29: Ross Reedstrom tipped us about the
gq package as a
useful GUI alternative. It seem like a good tool, but is unmaintained
in Debian and got a RC bug keeping it out of Squeeze. Unless that
changes, it will not be an option for Debian Edu based on Squeeze.

A while back, I
complained
about the fact that it is not possible with the provided schemas
for storing DNS and DHCP information in LDAP to combine the two sets
of information into one LDAP object representing a computer.

In the mean time, I discovered that a simple fix would be to make
the dhcpHost object class auxiliary, to allow it to be combined with
the dNSDomain object class, and thus forming one object for one
computer when storing both DHCP and DNS information in LDAP.

If I understand this correctly, it is not safe to do this change
without also changing the assigned number for the object class, and I
do not know enough about LDAP schema design to do that properly for
Debian Edu.

Anyway, for future reference, this is how I believe we could change
the
DHCP
schema to solve at least part of the problem with the LDAP schemas
available today from IETF.

After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants
to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The
surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all
xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not
sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129
packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no
longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which
I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete?

For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase
which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking
aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are
too surprising.

I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated
and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list
of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL
above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test
for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking
conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using
'echo >> /proc/pidofdpkg/fd/0' to tell dpkg to
continue.

The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
have been discovered and reported in the process
(#585410 in nagios3-cgi,
#584879 already fixed in
enscript and #584861 in
kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
am working on a script to automate the test.

The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a
desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).

A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
is created. The bug report
#566000 make me suspect
this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
known
issue and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
Debian Squeeze.

Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
script, which I call upgrade-test for now, is doing the
trick:

I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
kdebase-workspace-data

I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded

I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
packages.

When using sitesummary at a site to track machines, it is possible
to get a list of the machine types in use thanks to the DMI
information extracted from each machine. The script to do so is
included in the sitesummary package, and here is example output from
the Skolelinux build servers:

The quality of the report depend on the quality of the DMI tables
provided in each machine. Here there are Intel machines without model
information listed with Intel as vendor and no model, and virtual Xen
machines listed as [no-dmi-info]. One can add -l as a command line
option to list the individual machines.

A larger list is
available from the the
city of Narvik, which uses Skolelinux on all their shools and also
provide the basic sitesummary report publicly. In their report there
are ~1400 machines. I know they use both Ubuntu and Skolelinux on
their machines, and as sitesummary is available in both distributions,
it is trivial to get all of them to report to the same central
collector.

It is strange to watch how a bug in Debian causing KDM to fail to
start at boot when an NVidia video card is used is handled. The
problem seem to be that the nvidia X.org driver uses a long time to
initialize, and this duration is longer than kdm is configured to
wait.

I came across two bugs related to this issue,
#583312 initially filed
against initscripts and passed on to nvidia-glx when it became obvious
that the nvidia drivers were involved, and
#524751 initially filed against
kdm and passed on to src:nvidia-graphics-drivers for unknown reasons.

To me, it seem that no-one is interested in actually solving the
problem nvidia video card owners experience and make sure the Debian
distribution work out of the box for these users. The nvidia driver
maintainers expect kdm to be set up to wait longer, while kdm expect
the nvidia driver maintainers to fix the driver to start faster, and
while they wait for each other I guess the users end up switching to a
distribution that work for them. I have no idea what the solution is,
but I am pretty sure that waiting for each other is not it.

A few days ago, parallel booting was enabled in Debian/testing.
The feature seem to hold up pretty well, but three fairly serious
issues are known and should be solved:

The wicd package seen to
break NFS mounting and
network setup when
parallel booting is enabled. No idea why, but the wicd maintainer
seem to be on the case.

The nvidia X driver seem to
have a race condition
triggered more easily when parallel booting is in effect. The
maintainer is on the case.

The sysv-rc package fail to properly enable dependency based boot
sequencing (the shutdown is broken) when old file-rc users
try to switch back to
sysv-rc. One way to solve it would be for file-rc to create
/etc/init.d/.legacy-bootordering, and another is to try to make
sysv-rc more robust. Will investigate some more and probably upload a
workaround in sysv-rc to help those trying to move from file-rc to
sysv-rc get a working shutdown.

All in all not many surprising issues, and all of them seem
solvable before Squeeze is released. In addition to these there are
some packages with bugs in their dependencies and run level settings,
which I expect will be fixed in a reasonable time span.

After a long break from debian-installer development, I finally
found time today to return to the project. Having to spend less time
working dependency based boot in debian, as it is almost complete now,
definitely helped freeing some time.

A while back, I ran into a problem while working on Debian Edu. We
include some firmware packages on the Debian Edu CDs, those needed to
get disk and network controllers working. Without having these
firmware packages available during installation, it is impossible to
install Debian Edu on the given machine, and because our target group
are non-technical people, asking them to provide firmware packages on
an external medium is a support pain. Initially, I expected it to be
enough to include the firmware packages on the CD to get
debian-installer to find and use them. This proved to be wrong.
Next, I hoped it was enough to symlink the relevant firmware packages
to some useful location on the CD (tried /cdrom/ and
/cdrom/firmware/). This also proved to not work, and at this point I
found time to look at the debian-installer code to figure out what was
going to work.

The firmware loading code is in the hw-detect package, and a closer
look revealed that it would only look for firmware packages outside
the installation media, so the CD was never checked for firmware
packages. It would only check USB sticks, floppies and other
"external" media devices. Today I changed it to also look in the
/cdrom/firmware/ directory on the mounted CD or DVD, which should
solve the problem I ran into with Debian edu. I also changed it to
look in /firmware/, to make sure the installer also find firmware
provided in the initrd when booting the installer via PXE, to allow us
to provide the same feature in the PXE setup included in Debian
Edu.

To make sure firmware deb packages with a license questions are not
activated without asking if the license is accepted, I extended
hw-detect to look for preinst scripts in the firmware packages, and
run these before activating the firmware during installation. The
license question is asked using debconf in the preinst, so this should
solve the issue for the firmware packages I have looked at so far.

If you want to discuss the details of these features, please
contact us on debian-boot@lists.debian.org.

Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
libpam-mklocaluser
package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
into unstable. The
pam-python
package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
sssd package
passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
libpam-ccreds
package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.

This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
for nscd in BTS report
#485282 is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
care of the caching of passwords and group information.

I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
find time to make sure the next release will include both the
Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
and I am sure we will find a good solution.

The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
on the home directory servers.

One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.

If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Since this evening, parallel booting is the default in
Debian/unstable for machines using dependency based boot sequencing.
Apparently the testing of concurrent booting has been wider than
expected, if I am to believe the
input
on debian-devel@, and I concluded a few days ago to move forward
with the feature this weekend, to give us some time to detect any
remaining problems before Squeeze is frozen. If serious problems are
detected, it is simple to change the default back to sequential boot.
The upload of the new sysvinit package also activate a new upstream
version.

More information about
dependency
based boot sequencing is available from the Debian wiki. It is
currently possible to disable parallel booting when one run into
problems caused by it, by adding this line to /etc/default/rcS:

In the recent Debian Edu versions, the
sitesummary
system is used to keep track of the machines in the school
network. Each machine will automatically report its status to the
central server after boot and once per night. The network setup is
also reported, and using this information it is possible to get the
MAC address of all network interfaces in the machines. This is useful
to update the DHCP configuration.

To give some idea how to use sitesummary, here is a one-liner to
ist all MAC addresses of all machines reporting to sitesummary. Run
this on the collector host:

This will list all MAC addresses assosiated with all machine, one
line per machine and with space between the MAC addresses.

To allow system administrators easier job at adding static DHCP
addresses for hosts, it would be possible to extend this to fetch
machine information from sitesummary and update the DHCP and DNS
tables in LDAP using this information. Such tool is unfortunately not
written yet.

One interesting feature in Active Directory, is the ability to
create a new user with an expired password, and thus force the user to
change the password on the first login attempt.

I'm not quite sure how to do that with the LDAP setup in Debian
Edu, but did some initial testing with a local account. The account
and password aging information is available in /etc/shadow, but
unfortunately, it is not possible to specify an expiration time for
passwords, only a maximum age for passwords.

A freshly created account (using adduser test) will have these
settings in /etc/shadow:

root@tjener:~# chage -l test
Last password change : May 02, 2010
Password expires : never
Password inactive : never
Account expires : never
Minimum number of days between password change : 0
Maximum number of days between password change : 99999
Number of days of warning before password expires : 7
root@tjener:~#

The only way I could come up with to create a user with an expired
account, is to change the date of the last password change to the
lowest value possible (January 1th 1970), and the maximum password age
to the difference in days between that date and today. To make it
simple, I went for 30 years (30 * 365 = 10950) and January 2th (to
avoid testing if 0 is a valid value).

So far I have tested this with ssh and console, and kdm (in
Squeeze) login, and all ask for a new password before login in the
user (with ssh, I was thrown out and had to log in again).

Perhaps we should set up something similar for Debian Edu, to make
sure only the user itself have the account password?

If you want to comment on or help out with implementing this for
Debian Edu, please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Update 2010-05-02 17:20: Paul Tötterman tells me on IRC that the
shadow(8) page in Debian/testing now state that setting the date of
last password change to zero (0) will force the password to be changed
on the first login. This was not mentioned in the manual in Lenny, so
I did not notice this in my initial testing. I have tested it on
Squeeze, and 'chage -d 0 username' do work there. I have not
tested it on Lenny yet.

Update 2010-05-02-19:05: Jim Paris tells me via email that an
equivalent command to expire a password is 'passwd -e
username', which insert zero into the date of the last password
change.

For some years now, I have wondered how we should handle laptops in
Debian Edu. The Debian Edu infrastructure is mostly designed to
handle stationary computers, and less suited for computers that come
and go.

Now I finally believe I have an sensible idea on how to adjust
Debian Edu for laptops, by introducing a new profile for them, for
example called Roaming Workstations. Here are my thought on this.
The setup would consist of the following:

During installation, the user name of the owner / primary user of
the laptop is requested and a local home directory is set up for
the user, with uid and gid information fetched from the LDAP
server. This allow the user to work also when offline. The
central home directory can be available in a subdirectory on
request, for example mounted via CIFS. It could be mounted
automatically when a user log in while on the Debian Edu network,
and unmounted when the machine is taken away (network down,
hibernate, etc), it can be set up to do automatic mounting on
request (using autofs), or perhaps some GUI button on the desktop
can be used to access it when needed. Perhaps it is enough to use
the fish protocol in KDE?

Password checking is set up to use LDAP or Kerberos
authentication when the machine is on the Debian Edu network, and
to cache the password for offline checking when the machine unable
to reach the LDAP or Kerberos server. This can be done using
libpam-ccreds
or the Fedora developed
System
Security Services Daemon packages.

File synchronisation with the central home directory is set up
using a shared directory in both the local and the central home
directory, using unison.

Printing should be set up to print to all printers broadcasting
their existence on the local network, and should then work out of
the box with CUPS. For sites needing accurate printer quotas, some
system with Kerberos authentication or printing via ssh could be
implemented.

For users that should have local root access to their laptop,
sudo should be used to allow this to the local user.

It would be nice if user and group information from LDAP is
cached on the client, but given that there are entries for the
local user and primary group in /etc/, it should not be needed.

I believe all the pieces to implement this are in Debian/testing at
the moment. If we work quickly, we should be able to get this ready
in time for the Squeeze release to freeze. Some of the pieces need
tweaking, like libpam-ccreds should get support for pam-auth-update
(#566718) and nslcd (or
perhaps debian-edu-config) should get some integration code to stop
its daemon when the LDAP server is unavailable to avoid long timeouts
when disconnected from the net. If we get Kerberos enabled, we need
to make sure we avoid long timeouts there too.

If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.

Yesterdays
NUUG presentation about Kerberos was inspiring, and reminded me
about the need to start using Kerberos in Skolelinux. Setting up a
Kerberos server seem to be straight forward, and if we get this in
place a long time before the Squeeze version of Debian freezes, we
have a chance to migrate Skolelinux away from NFSv3 for the home
directories, and over to an architecture where the infrastructure do
not have to trust IP addresses and machines, and instead can trust
users and cryptographic keys instead.

A challenge will be integration and administration. Is there a
Kerberos implementation for Debian where one can control the
administration access in Kerberos using LDAP groups? With it, the
school administration will have to maintain access control using flat
files on the main server, which give a huge potential for errors.

A related question I would like to know is how well Kerberos and
pam-ccreds (offline password check) work together. Anyone know?

Next step will be to use Kerberos for access control in Lwat and
Nagios. I have no idea how much work that will be to implement. We
would also need to document how to integrate with Windows AD, as such
shared network will require two Kerberos realms that need to cooperate
to work properly.

I believe a good start would be to start using Kerberos on the
skolelinux.no machines, and this way get ourselves experience with
configuration and integration. A natural starting point would be
setting up ldap.skolelinux.no as the Kerberos server, and migrate the
rest of the machines from PAM via LDAP to PAM via Kerberos one at the
time.

If you would like to contribute to get this working in Skolelinux,
I recommend you to see the video recording from yesterdays NUUG
presentation, and start using Kerberos at home. The video show show
up in a few days.

6 years ago, as part of the Debian Edu development I am involved
in, I asked for a hook in the kdm and gdm setup to run scripts as root
when the user log out. A bug was submitted against the xfree86-common
package in 2004 (#230422),
and revisited every time Debian Edu was working on a new release.
Today, this finally paid off.

The framework for this feature was today commited to the git
repositry for the xorg package, and the git repository for xdm has
been updated to use this framework. Next on my agenda is to make sure
kdm and gdm also add code to use this framework.

In Debian Edu, we want to ability to run commands as root when the
user log out, to get rid of runaway processes and do general cleanup
after a user. With this framework in place, we finally can do that in
a generic way that work with all display managers using this
framework. My goal is to get all display managers in Debian use it,
similar to how they use the Xsession.d framework today.

On Tuesday, the Debian/Lenny based version of
Skolelinux was finally
shipped. This was a major leap forward for the project, and I am very
pleased that we finally got the release wrapped up. Work on the first
point release starts imediately, as we plan to get that one out a
month after the major release, to include all fixes for bugs we found
and fixed too late in the release process to include last Tuesday.

Perhaps it even is time for some partying?

After this first point release, my plan is to focus again on the
next major release, based on Squeeze. We will try to get as many of
the fixes we need into the official Debian packages before the freeze,
and have just a few weeks or months to make it happen.

One of the new features in the next Debian/Lenny based release of
Debian Edu/Skolelinux, which is scheduled for release in the next few
days, is automatic configuration of the service monitoring system
Nagios. The previous release had automatic configuration of trend
analysis using Munin, and this Lenny based release take that a step
further.

When installing a Debian Edu Main-server, it is automatically
configured as a Munin and Nagios server. In addition, it is
configured to be a server for the
SiteSummary
system I have written for use in Debian Edu. The SiteSummary
system is inspired by a system used by the University of Oslo where I
work. In short, the system provide a centralised collector of
information about the computers on the network, and a client on each
computer submitting information to this collector. This allow for
automatic information on which packages are installed on each machine,
which kernel the machines are using, what kind of configuration the
packages got etc. This also allow us to automatically generate Munin
and Nagios configuration.

All computers reporting to the sitesummary collector with the
munin-node package installed is automatically enabled as a Munin
client and graphs from the statistics collected from that machine show
up automatically on http://www/munin/ on the Main-server.

All non-laptop computers reporting to the sitesummary collector are
automatically monitored for network presence (ping and any network
services detected). In addition, all computers (also laptops) with
the nagios-nrpe-server package installed and configured the way
sitesummary would configure it, are monitored for full disks, software
raid status, swap free and other checks that need to run locally on
the machine.

The result is that the administrator on a school using Debian Edu
based on Lenny will be able to check the health of his installation
with one look at the Nagios settings, without having to spend any time
keeping the Nagios configuration up-to-date.

The only configuration one need to do to get Nagios up and running
is to set the password used to get access via HTTP. The system
administrator need to run "htpasswd /etc/nagios3/htpasswd.users
nagiosadmin" to create a nagiosadmin user and set a password for
it to be able to log into the Nagios web pages. After that,
everything is taken care of.

I'm sitting on the train going home from this weekends Debian
Edu/Skolelinux development gathering. I got a bit done tuning the
desktop, and looked into the dynamic service location protocol
implementation avahi. It look like it could be useful for us. Almost
30 people participated, and I believe it was a great environment to
get to know the Skolelinux system. Walter Bender, involved in the
development of the Sugar educational platform, presented his stuff and
also helped me improve my OLPC installation. He also showed me that
his Turtle Art application can be used in standalone mode, and we
agreed that I would help getting it packaged for Debian. As a
standalone application it would be great for Debian Edu. We also
tried to get the video conferencing working with two OLPCs, but that
proved to be too hard for us. The application seem to need more work
before it is ready for me. I look forward to getting home and relax
now. :)

The state of standardized LDAP schemas on Linux is far from
optimal. There is RFC 2307 documenting one way to store NIS maps in
LDAP, and a modified version of this normally called RFC 2307bis, with
some modifications to be compatible with Active Directory. The RFC
specification handle the content of a lot of system databases, but do
not handle DNS zones and DHCP configuration.

In Debian Edu/Skolelinux,
we would like to store information about users, SMB clients/hosts,
filegroups, netgroups (users and hosts), DHCP and DNS configuration,
and LTSP configuration in LDAP. These objects have a lot in common,
but with the current LDAP schemas it is not possible to have one
object per entity. For example, one need to have at least three LDAP
objects for a given computer, one with the SMB related stuff, one with
DNS information and another with DHCP information. The schemas
provided for DNS and DHCP are impossible to combine into one LDAP
object. In addition, it is impossible to implement quick queries for
netgroup membership, because of the way NIS triples are implemented.
It just do not scale. I believe it is time for a few RFC
specifications to cleam up this mess.

I would like to have one LDAP object representing each computer in
the network, and this object can then keep the SMB (ie host key), DHCP
(mac address/name) and DNS (name/IP address) settings in one place.
It need to be efficently stored to make sure it scale well.

I would also like to have a quick way to map from a user or
computer and to the net group this user or computer is a member.

Active Directory have done a better job than unix heads like myself
in this regard, and the unix side need to catch up. Time to start a
new IETF work group?

This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in
Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the
member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the
LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network.
Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both
screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the
diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not
finish it before the weekend was up.

Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from
the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next
development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer
automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one
of these cards.

Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser
plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by
default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with
control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming
all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and
notes are available on
the
Debian wiki. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to
fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really
bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME
types I would expect to work with any free software player (like
video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the
audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the
totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No
wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.

For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to
be the only one fitting our needs. :/